


Lunitidal Intervals

by rjn



Category: Baywatch (TV)
Genre: 90s, Angst, Gen, I mean very slow, M/M, Slow Burn, slow like it spans 1989 to 2003
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2020-05-13 06:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 21,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19245982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rjn/pseuds/rjn
Summary: The tide goes in; the tide goes out.Craig lets himself get pulled out to sea sometimes.But he knows some pretty great lifeguards.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Ever since Prime started streaming remastered Baywatch, the early seasons have been the only crackfic I have ever truly enjoyed. I am in love with the rad 90s styles. The Eddie actor has a seriously bad case of Child Actor Face, and they frequently put him in cropped t-shirts. Picture era-typical toxic masculinity coming in torrents from a character clothed entirely from the girls section of Baby Gap. So confusing, and yet, not even in the top fifty most confusing elements to the show. People washed back up on the shore in later seasons with backstories erased and plot holes deep as the Pacific. It had all of the continuity issues of one of those 50 year running soap operas, but condensed over 9 seasons. And the plot holes started so, so early on. 
> 
> If they’d had the internet in a big way back then, there would have been five million entries on AO3 for the first season of Baywatch Classique alone. Here’s my contribution.

It shouldn’t have happened. There are rules in place, relief requirements and on-call scheduling. Nobody should make a half dozen physically and mentally demanding saves and stay out on a tower, working exhausted for the remainder of the shift. But Eddie is one of the most stubborn men Craig knows (and Craig has known Mitch since they were kids) and self-reliant in a desperate, life-long way that means the guy doesn’t ask for help easily.

It’s possible Eddie was just as mixed-up as everyone else and, not thinking clearly, missed his chance for a substitution. Part of the problem was that he’d sent half his paperwork back to HQ with Newmie after the fourth gruelling save, the one with the violently struggling victim who’d had about fifty pounds on Eddie. Turning in paperwork is as good as signing off, for the most part, so maybe Eddie had been waiting on his back-up guard all along, just too busy to call around and follow up.

Craig had been in headquarters when Mitch commented on it, flipping through the impressive stack of incident cards Mike had delivered.

“Busy day for Eddie.”

“That’s how he likes it.”

It looked to them like a full day’s work, and neither thought to check who was at the tower for the afternoon. But as it turned out, the cards were just the first half of Eddie’s shift, and he had gone on to race into the surf again and again, to the point where the adjacent towers were manned by second and third wave relief guards who didn’t realize they were rushing in to lend support to a guy who’d been on the sand since early that morning.

By the time they figured out that Eddie was still going, it was close enough to the end of his shift that all Craig could do was show up with the truck five minutes early, enough time to shuttle Eddie into the passenger seat to rest while Craig closed up the tower for him.

He drove Eddie home-- to his and Gina’s home, Eddie’s temporary crash mat. And the sullen look on Eddie’s face and a comment about “a lot of work for no overtime” almost had him regretting the Corvette, wishing, curiously, that he had something more classic for times like this, something that Eddie would appreciate, to go along with his naturally rough-around-the-edges James Dean vibe.

(Craig had flat out asked him once, seeing Eddie arrive in a rolled-sleeve t-shirt and ripped jeans, if that was the aesthetic he was cultivating. _I don’t even know what aesthetic means_ , he’d said, his wry grin showing that he was in on the joke, but askew just enough for Craig to suspect he probably wasn’t entirely.)

The overworked mess had been right in the middle of Craig’s bachelor stint, Gina off visiting family in New York. There was nobody to welcome them, and barely anything to eat at home. Gina would have been disappointed in Craig, for leaving the kid hanging at Tower 18 all day and then hauling him back to this depressing takeout in front of the television existence. Like it or not, Gina has effectively adopted Eddie on Craig’s behalf, and she has much higher standards.

Craig steered a sleepwalking Eddie to the kitchen table and ordered a pizza before taking up residence in his favorite spot to lean with a coffee mug, equidistant from fridge and espresso machine. These were the days when Eddie would often come over to “borrow” coffee in the mornings and lean against the counter on the opposite side of the espresso maker, swapping sections of the newspaper and having a friendly sidelong conversation.

“That was stupid,” Craig had muttered.

Eddie seemed to startle slightly more awake at that, defensive, thinking he was getting reamed out for staying on duty past the point of fatigue.

“I lost track of the time. I didn’t mean to get that bad. I called everything in...”

 “No, no,” Craig reassured. “I was saying it’s stupid to order food when you’re just going to fall asleep and face plant in it.”

“Oh. Right.”

And sure enough, when the food arrived, Eddie was more or less sleeping. He was barely upright in the modern art excuse for a dining chair, his eyes gazing sightlessly at the door of the microwave.

Craig, abandoning the pizza, hauled him up and led him to the nearest suitably horizontal surface, namely the king-sized bed in the loft. His and Gina’s bed. Eddie had looked hilariously miniature, slumped at the foot of the bed on what is habitually Craig’s side. He went to pull his shirt over his head and huffed in quiet confusion.

“Inside out?”

“I didn’t say anything in case it was a fashion statement,” Craig had snarked.

Eddie grinned and half-rolled, half-fell onto his side, asleep in an instant, practically hanging off the side of the bed. Craig has never known anyone quite so determined to take up zero space in the world. Eddie’s own mattress in the storage room was a travesty, equivalent to a large dog bed. Craig tried not to think too hard about how every worldly possession of Eddie’s could be packed, with minimal spillage, into a locker at work.

He grabbed a handful of files from his briefcase and stacked up all the pillows on Gina’s side of the bed (Eddie was apparently content using his own arm as a pillow) to prop himself up and catch up on his cases. He told himself it was the only practical solution. Craig was tired too, ready to be horizontal for a solid eight, and it’s not like he was invading Eddie’s space, given that the rookie was passed out, far off on a mere sliver out of the acres of bed. Craig fell asleep still sitting up, manila file folders having long since slid to the floor beside him.

Craig already had the sense that Eddie was a renowned disaster at sleeping, and he was not entirely surprised to be awakened on the wrong side of the bed by a shifting, shuddering presence. He managed to react quickly when Eddie appeared poised to topple over the side of the bed, shooting an arm out fast enough to grab him by the ankle. Craig pulled him over to the relative safety of the middle of the bed, easily dragging over the duvet that hadn’t been so much as pulled back yet. For all his compact muscle, Eddie was easy to manhandle, warm and pliant, and Craig was uncomfortable to find himself vaguely enamored by that fact.

“Morning,” Eddie croaked without opening his eyes. Wondering tone, but remarkably unruffled for a guy who had just about nosedived off an unfamiliar bed at-- Craig checked the lit-up numbers on his dive watch-- three in the morning.

“Not quite. Go back to sleep, Eddie.”

Eddie hummed happily and turned on his side, which was when Craig realized he still had a hold on his ankle, thumb rubbing casual circles over the shin bone. He reeled it back quickly, like he’d been shocked, and Eddie made an unhappy snuffling noise, but seemed to be sleeping again already.

Craig didn’t fall back asleep until quarter to five, and then woke just twenty minutes later, gasping, having dreamt of pulling Eddie out of the pounding surf by his ankles, into the middle of a beautifully arranged bed, crawling over him, looking down on the subtly pinched look Eddie gets around the eyes when he’s worried or scared, and kissing it all away.

Heart pounding, Craig proceeded to have the quietest, most motionless freak out of his entire life.


	2. Chapter 2

After the shared bed and Craig’s minor panic attack, which he had managed to hide by the simple favor of Eddie sleeping in late enough for Craig to sneak away to a work meeting, things go back to normal. Eddie finally takes a day off. Craig only takes on a few shifts over the ensuing weeks and stops hanging around headquarters after his morning workouts. He doesn’t see much of Eddie at all until after Gina comes home. Doesn’t talk to him for more than traded greetings in passing and doesn’t really set eyes on him for any significant length of time until they’re hauling Eddie onto the beach beside the collapsed pier. Then Craig is performing CPR, and Mitch is sternly commanding Eddie to breathe, and Shauni is inconsolable until Eddie gets enough oxygen in him to give his trademark grin. A throw away joke falls from his blue-tinged lips, trying once again to lessen everyone’s concern. Always minimizing, this damn kid, trying to shrink his footprint, unaware of the outsized weight of affection he garners from everyone who gets to know him.

Craig has felt the elated high of a successful rescue as much as almost anyone at Baywatch, but there’s a special kind of giddy relief when he looks to Mitch by the remains of the pier, in the shadow of that infuriating truck, his knee pressed alongside Eddie’s hip. But Mitch’s returning smile has a hint of something. A knowing slant, maybe. A little like sympathy, but curiously directed at _Craig_.

Catching his own breath and blocking out all awareness of just how goddamned _close_ they’d been to catastrophe, Craig doesn’t watch Shauni kissing Eddie, which she does right up until Mitch teases that she’s going to stop the guy’s breathing again. Craig can’t stop himself from stupidly looking, with barely concealed panic in the motion, to make sure that’s not the case. He can’t bring himself to break contact, but when Eddie digs his heels into the sand and reaches for help from Mitch to sit, it’s gone.

To his relief, Craig’s stubbornly vivid dreams that night are of Gina, and kissing her. Just Gina, her perfectly lush lips, and no glint of teeth flashing above a neatly square jaw.

And yet. He’s aware of a physical impossibility, a dreamland betrayal, that his arm is around Eddie’s chest at the very same time, the familiarity of a rescue hold, keeping Eddie’s head above water, skin wet and sliding, and feeling desperately for the movement of a breath taken in.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here comes John D. Motherfutzing Cort...

“How’s he doing?” Mitch asks, one day after the armored car.

Craig shrugs and says he seems fine. Gina had called and told him that, at least. Eddie had still been holed up with Shauni in the storage closet that he now calls his “micro apartment” when Craig had left for his morning workout.

“Broken ribs are no treat,” Mitch says, and his expression turns fond. “Not that we’ll ever hear Eddie complaining.”

Mitch treats Eddie more like a son than anything. A slightly distant, unknowable like a teenager son, but one he’s staunchly proud of all the same. It’s different for Craig, of course. Putting a roof over the kid’s head had lent a sort of immediate intimacy to their friendship, but somehow Craig has managed to keep the paternalistic edge out of things. And maybe that’s easy, with Eddie, because the guy is remarkably contained, with the kind of hard-earned knack for self-sufficiency that can only come from having escaped an adolescence of being let down in the most devastating ways.

Maybe that’s part of what Craig provides now. Not a fatherly font of advice and strict expectations, but more of a safety net. Eddie can have a bit more fun, act his age, even, knowing that Craig has his back. With a place to stay and food to eat. Hell, even bail money if things get out of hand. And Craig is satisfied that his feelings for Eddie boil down to a completely appropriate fondness for an all-round good guy.

Shortly after Eddie returns to work, Cort comes crashing back onto the beach.

Craig is happy for the distraction that follows. He can just about handle his demanding clients and his lifeguarding work, making time for his saint of a wife, keeping Mitch sane in his Lieutenant shoes, maintaining a carefully guarded friendship with Eddie. He can handle it all as long as his time on the beach is not complicated by the kind of drama that thankfully gets sucked away by the gravitational force that is John D. Cort.

Craig has always liked Cort, in a begrudging way, because as much as the man is a human whirlwind of disaster, his heart tends to be in the right place. He’s a natural imposition, but one Craig has been comfortable with for over a decade by now. It’s just that, increasingly, another thing being drawn into the Cort vortex is Eddie.

It was no surprise that Cort’s rodeo theatrics would foster some kind of confederate outlaw longing in a guy like Eddie. The only difference is that Cort’s short fuse is tempered by an oddly charming devil may care attitude, where Eddie’s is tamped down with a self-serious kind of indignation. It doesn’t take a Navy SEAL to see the explosive possibilities.

It’s not just Craig’s anxiety, either. Gina expresses concerns, namely that Cort has never wasted much time considering consequences, and Eddie has just settled into a life where he’s not constantly expecting a downpour of worst-case scenarios on every horizon. Mitch even goes through the motions of talking to Cort, trying to subtly reel him, but Craig knows, from the moment he hears about the right hook, that there’s no point. The best they can do is put Eddie on equal footing, make sure he doesn’t go sucking on Cort’s wake like a tagalong little brother.

Cort is his usual presumptuous self, conscripting Eddie to work in the dive shop, but Eddie surprises them when he pushes back. Still, nobody is surprised when Eddie gets hurt.

He’s coming home as Craig is just about heading out the door for his workout with Mitch. Craig thinks of five or six different avenues of attack, his lawyer brain working even as he swallows his first gulp of coffee. _What happened_ would be a good start, but Mitch had already phoned with the broad strokes four hours ago, readying Baywatch’s official predawn legal counsel in case they needed him. _Are you okay_ would work, or maybe asking if Cort was still alive, but that’s not what comes out of Craig’s mouth either.

“Let me see it.”

Craig has no idea where it comes from, his impulse to see the predictably violent result of being swept up in a John D. Cort caper. Eddie doesn’t insult him with an innocent act, but he does play up being preoccupied, a kind of bored distraction written on his face. He has a darkening black eye and the clear one is underlined with a faint shadow of exhaustion. He’s not standing as straight-backed as usual, he but seems steady on his feet.

“See what?” he says.

Instead of making eye contact, he is covetously eyeing Craig’s half-full coffee mug. Craig hands it over.

“What happened with Cort.”

He leaves it out there, an answer and a question at once. Eddie’s mouth opens, but no sound comes out, and he keeps looking past Craig, eyes darting, evading. Craig sighs.

“Is this how it’s going to be? You outrun the messes from your past just to turn a corner and slam into Cort’s?”

“We handled it,” Eddie snaps back. He goes to casually take a sip of the tepid coffee and his shaky hands betray him.

“You got _stabbed._ ”

There’s the slightest hint of denial flashing across Eddie’s face, but also surprise, either at the incredulous anxious tone of Craig’s voice, or that Mitch had already sold him out so early in the morning.

Craig could have put the pieces together. When Cort’s acquaintances came calling, the result was a familiar tale, a combination of Eddie and Cort characteristic styles of escalation. Quickly and unfaltering loyal, Eddie hadn’t waited to sort out the particulars of whatever unseemly scheme of Cort’s had backfired. The attack impinged on his sense of allegiance, and he jumped into the fray. Cort had thrown out a few wisecracks before taking the worst of it, broken ribs, and Eddie escaped with a dozen or so stitches. Craig knows that, perversely, after being dragged into this mess, Eddie will be even more devoted to the guy. A real John D. Cort shitshow strengthens bonds like you wouldn’t believe.

It had to have been a sight, Eddie attempting to step in and fight in his defence, because Cort and his batted-hardened muscular frame towers head and shoulders over Eddie. But then, in a few short months Craig has seen Eddie jump headlong into a lot of dangerous situations without the slightest regard for his featherweight reality. It was one of the most frustrating things about him, in Mitch’s estimation also. After Eddie had got into it with a Spring Breaking linebacker looking for a fight near Tower 23, Mitch had let his frustration out at Craig: _Someone needs to explain to Eddie that he’s not a two hundred and fifty pound pitbull._ But Eddie can actually fight, is the thing, has the look of a guy who had lessons somewhere along the way. There was no way to hold him back.

“A _little bit_ stabbed,” Eddie insists, always diminishing, and flashes one of his distractingly attractive smiles.

“Oh, I see. I’ll save my concern for when you get a lot bit stabbed, then.”

Craig brushes past, scooping up his gear bag on the way to the door.

“It’s not that bad,” Eddie says.

And when Craig stops and turns around, Eddie is gently tugging his t-shirt up on his right side, where his stomach and rib cage are dark with bruising. A stark white bandage is taped somewhere close to the middle of the damage. Eddie is looking himself over as if seeing it for the first time with him.

Craig’s bag hits the floor and he’s stepping forward before he even realizes it. He presses his palm gently on Eddie’s skin and they wince in unison. It’s a long enough touch that Craig has to put on his most serious First Aid frown and shift slightly to press in two more spots just as carefully and lingering, selling the whole thing as a quasi medical concern. Eddie’s skin is warm and Craig is surprised to find himself familiar with the solid wet-sand density of Eddie’s torso. Roughhousing and training drills. Craig knows Eddie’s body from more than his vaguely worrying dreams.

“Be careful running around with Cort. He’s a great guy and everything, but…”

“Yeah, I know.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

Eddie spends more time at headquarters than he used to, less time at the apartment. He’s more comfortable at work, it seems, since he’s realized that nobody is waiting for him to screw up so that they can bounce him out of there. Craig finds out about the surfing trip from Cort, not Eddie, and realizes he doesn’t see much of Eddie anymore. The surf trip is exactly the kind of thing he would have wanted to arrange himself had he thought of it or had the time. He pours every spare hour he can whittle out of his schedule into adventures like that. Kayaking and hiking are his go-tos with Mitch and Gina, but Eddie would be surfing. He’s still relatively new to it, and his fervour is contagious and charming in a way Craig hasn’t felt since he first introduced Gina to the spoils of the West Coast.

Craig feels slightly bad for taking Cort up on his half-genuine invitation, but Cort has always been a the-more-the-merrier kind of guy when it comes to showing off surf spots, eschewing maps and direct approaches so that nobody else will be able to find his best places without him anyways. Initially Craig regrets the Jeep more, the taking charge it implies, because he recognizes the wary look of disdain Cort gives him for his control freak tendencies. It’s soothed over by Eddie’s immediate enthusiasm, which doesn’t diminish even under the realization that his short legs will volunteer him to ride cargo class the whole way.

It goes as stupidly wrong as any Cort trademarked venture does. The wild entanglements that are woven into the man’s DNA flare up inevitably. Craig finds himself furious, alternately at Cort and himself, for their carelessness at almost every turn. Eddie started as a voice of reason in concert to Craig’s own, maybe slightly more indulgent of Cort’s utter _Cortness_ , but generally in Craig’s corner, which had felt like vindication. But when things got out of control, the balance shifted until Craig was the raging and reckless one. Somehow Eddie was left alone to try and good-naturedly smooth things over.

He didn’t see much of the initial fight once it started. Craig had put himself, diving, between Eddie and three of Rigler’s guys, only to watch Eddie the Eagle soar over the table fists-first after the biggest thug there. Then for Craig it was a matter of staying alive long enough to catch sight of the Jeep. His head is ringing, and he’s pretty sure most of the blood on the bar top once belonged to him. He finds a tipped over bottle of mescal and pours what’s left into his mouth.

When he recovers himself enough to assess things, Craig sees Cort being fussed over by Inez, bleeding from his mouth and sort of propping himself up for her attentions, paying no mind to the way he keeps thumping into Eddie, who is scrabbling clumsily at the floor, trying to steady himself.

An aftershock of rage rolls through Craig again; at Rigler, at Rigler’s goons, at Cort, and at all the women who fall to their knees to revive Cort after he brings the wrath of the underworld down on everyone in his orbit.

Craig manages to step on most of the fingers of Cort’s right hand when he goes to give Eddie a hand up. It helps.

They wind up patching one another up under a flickering light bulb; Eddie’s face and knuckles, Craig’s back and his knee where he’s put it down hard on a piece of broken glass. Cort has shut himself away with Inez (which Craig is now certain was the whole covert objective of this entire ridiculous journey from the start) leaving his two friends, like long-suffering sidekicks, to bed down on the cantina floor.

Eddie folds their borrowed blanket in half and lays it out on the rough planks as a sort of mattress. It’s far more heart-breaking than the storage room dog bed, but after the surfing, the marching, the god damn _barroom brawl_ , exhaustion has set in. Craig lies down on his back, on what he estimates is half of the motheaten blanket. Eddie follows suit. After a moment, Eddie turns onto his side and lets a slow breath out, the sound of a man gearing down for sleep.

“Bienvenido a Mexico,” he says, his voice low and dustier than usual. They dissolve into tired laughter. Somehow, after the short-lived paradise of their surfing beach, even with all of the aches and pains and the edge of hysteria in Eddie’s voice, it is the best moment of the trip.

(It happens again, in a slightly less agitated way, on the way home. Mitch pulls over at the gas station and gets out to pump. Cort snores away up front and Eddie murmurs across the backseat.

“Craig. Hey, Craig.”

“Hm.”

“Craig, are you awake?”

“Yeah,” he says. “What?”

Turning now, eyes open to see Eddie’s serious-looking face staring back at him.

“I just wanted to say, I never really liked your Jeep,” he says.

“Thanks, Eddie. That makes me feel better.”

Their laughing wakes Cort, but he just smiles at them in the rear-view mirror, his split lip cracking open again.)


	5. Chapter 5

Mitch corners him, as much as anybody can be cornered, sitting on a surfboard in calm water on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. With Mitch it’s an inevitability thing. If they paddle far enough, even on the quietest days of their decades-long friendship, eventually they have to fill the air. And with an entire ocean at his disposal, Mitch can occasionally draw things out of Craig that Craig doesn’t even know exist but that apparently need to be discussed all the same.

They’re taking a break, leaned back and letting the sweat dry off their faces before the paddle back home when Mitch gets down to it.

“So, what is this thing with you three?”

Craig is genuinely confused.

“What thing? What three?”

Mitch ticks them off on his fingers.

“You. Cort. Dick Grayson your youthful ward.”

Craig snorts.

“Wow. Not that I mind the Batman comparison, but he would _not_ like to hear you call him that.”

Mitch is not waylaid.

“He is, though. _Youthful_ ,” he says, with an almost menacing emphasis.

“Sure, yeah, he’s a kid. Although kind of mature, for his age.”

“If you say so,” Mitch says, yet the look on his face begs to differ. The metronome of waves counts off a few more beats before he reminisces. “I thought we’d be fishing bits of Eddie out of a woodchipper after he threw that punch over the locker.”

“Cort would never leave that much evidence behind,” Craig says thoughtfully.

Again, Mitch ignores the banter. He’s after something that Craig is fairly certain he does not want to dig into. He sits up and starts ever-so-slightly kicking his legs back and forth, steering himself in a slow arc, aiming them towards land.

“An unlikely pair,” Mitch says.

“You’re joking. The short fuses? Shorter attention spans? The voids where their sense of self-preservation should live? Cort and Eddie are practically a matched set.”

“I meant you and Eddie. Although I do have to admit when we were that age, he’s almost exactly the type that you would have—”

“Whoa! No. That’s not even… No.”

“I know, not _Eddie_.” Somehow, Mitch’s dialing things back is less convincing than Craig's outright denial. “You don’t have the patience. I just mean… Well, you’re close. Buddies.”

Craig wonders what the comment about his impatience is supposed to mean, but he’s not willing to examine any part of this conversation more than absolutely necessary.

“We’re buddies, yeah.”

“I guess I’m just wondering how you got back to where you’re being dragged into John Cort capers, and it feels like the answer has something to do with Eddie.”

“Ahh. Now I get it.”

“What?”

Craig makes sure Mitch gets a look at his smirk before he turns his board and flops down to start the paddle home.

“I promise Eddie will never replace you,” he calls back over his shoulder.

“Fuck off, Pomeroy.”

He waits until Mitch is down at his level.

“You know what the best part of this workout was?”

“What?”

“When you called me Batman.”

“I’m rethinking it. You might be Alfred.”

“I _am_ Batman,” Craig says, kicking the back of Mitch’s board hard enough to send him wobbling into the next rolling wave.

“It was that or Daddy Warbucks.”

Craig makes sure to send a big splash into Mitch’s face on his first dip in on that side.

“You made the right choice.”


	6. Chapter 6

Craig is getting sick and tired of dragging Eddie’s breathless body out of the surf.

This time it’s not as severe as the armored car, but at the same time it’s potentially worse, because evidently Eddie is in serious trouble. Not that you could tell by the way Cort was acting, alternately picking at him for being reckless and stupid, and contriving much bigger, much more reckless and stupid “solutions” to the problem. Case in point, Cort’s first brainstormed alternative to reporting to the authorities is, quite naturally, a casino heist on international waters.

Craig could have slaughtered him, having seen Eddie at his most shaken and contrite and Cort _smacks him upside the head._ Understandably, Eddie is going to struggle with gambling; Eddie has never known an easy dollar in his life. Cort should have known better, taken him aside, had some words with the guy early on. Keeping Eddie away from his more unsavory diversions altogether was, of course, never an option, but he could have prepared him better, followed up after. Lamentably, Craig’s misdirected anger at Cort comes to a head and he also moves to slap sense into Eddie. A much lighter swat around the elbow, but intentionally aimed to take him by surprise. Something in the way Eddie flinches and cowers is profoundly distressing, and a knowing look is exchanged between Cort and Craig. The guilt burns in Craig’s stomach. The three of them thrive in horseplay, but that kind of physical reaction… well, it’s more clear than ever that Eddie has never known an easy _anything_ in his life. There are several people from Eddie’s past that Craig wants named, only so that he can do a little lawyerly digging, just to make sure that some form of karmic justice has been meted out.

He can’t get over the fact that Cort still seems protective of his illicit criminal relationships and connections, when all their efforts should be in defense of Eddie. He understands that there are risks involved in ratting out scumbags, but at least they would be able to meet threats head-on. He has trouble reconciling what happened to Eddie already, and the promise held by Cort’s shady deal making. Later, when he takes Cort aside, standing in front of the dive shop relying on the general clamour of the busy location to cover their voices, he doesn’t mince words.

“You could have got him killed. These kinds of people do not mess around.”

“You know all about _these kinds of people_ , do you? Lot of tough guys in corporate law?”

He wants to point out how pathetic it is, this tendency of Cort’s to imply he’s less of a man for not hanging out with a bunch of common criminals. There’s also the discomfiting implication of late, that they are the angel and devil over Eddie’s shoulders, battling for his soul. Craig ignores the bait, sticks with the disagreement at hand.

“I know Eddie barely got himself onto the beach in one piece, if that matters to you at all.”

Cort looks chastened at that and Craig recalls their arrival, Eddie more carried into the shop than helped along, the look of profound worry that had seemed so out of place on Cort’s face, before he went into military-like operations mode and brought out the shop’s first aid kit.

“I never would have thought that he’d go back there without me,” Cort says quietly. “He’s not usually the naïve kid you make him out to be.”

“I don’t make him out to be anything other than our friend, who hasn’t had the kind of advantages I’ve had or the kind of life experience you’ve had.”

Cort squints past Craig and doesn’t respond. He’s distracted, watching some interaction down the street. There’s a whole seedy underworld wheeling and dealing around them to Cort’s eye, Craig just doesn’t possess the right crooked lenses. He waves his hand in front of Cort’s face to get his attention.

“Just… try to be more careful, alright? I know that’s not your style, but for his sake, give it a try. For some mixed-up reason, Eddie seems to look up to you.”

Cort deflates slightly before shaking it off and putting a jocular grip on Craig’s arm.

“Thanks for getting him to fess up,” he says. “I can handle it from here.”

Cort adopts his blank face, his _sure Craig whatever you say_ look that goes on right before the shit hits the fan. Craig rankles at Cort’s dismissiveness. He’s been more than game, after all, hasn’t done so much as said anything to Mitch so far, and Cort takes that for granted. He wants to make it clear that it’s only for Eddie’s sake, that he’s giving them some time to try and work something out. If it was Cort alone, Craig would rat the whole thing out- to Mitch, to the police, and let Cort deal with the violent blowback from his casino friends.

“You’re doing a great job _handling him_ so far,” he snaps. He takes himself by surprise with the slip, and from the way Cort’s eyes narrow, he realizes he may have hit on something. And god, he hopes he’s misreading things, because Cort leaves women discarded in his wake with surprisingly little fallout, but when it’s a guy, when it’s a fellow lifeguard, _when it’s Eddie…_

Craig walks away from the shop with a headache, symptom of the constant tightening of neck muscles that begins the moment Cort’s stupid cowboy boots stomp into headquarters. And there’s something else this time, an ulcerous feeling in the pit of his chest, a hollow note when his heart beats.

-

A day later, and Craig has the impression he’s supposed to be happy just to be kept in the loop in the vaguest sense. He’s disappointed, almost, that Cort thinks so little of him, but Craig plays along. He is just happy to be included, he suggests. He will play his role as an excuse to get a boat close enough to the casino for the two idiots to swim in like spycraft commandos.

 “It’s sweet,” Gina says, as Craig zips her into a stunning red gown. “Like Eddie believes in honor among thieves or something.”

“Yeah, for sure, breaking into a criminal stronghold on the high seas to avenge your gambling debts is the sweetest.”

Craig shoots his sleeves and twists silver cufflinks into place. He checks his hair in the mirror over Gina’s shoulder while she holds two different earring options up to the sides of her head.

“They cheated him,” she says, with the same insulted intonation that Eddie has taken on lately.

It seems to come naturally to her. Craig wonders if it isn’t completely Cort’s influence that has Eddie acting so entitled, so sure of his ability to charm his way out of any situation, so indignant when that’s not the case.

“They cheated him at an illegal casino on a stolen rusted-out freighter. What a surprising betrayal,” Craig says dryly. “The dangly ones.”

Gina, true to their well-practiced routine, discards the dangly earrings of Craig’s suggestion and goes with something more dramatic, jewels climbing the edges of her ears. She is utterly gorgeous. If Craig is relegated to the distraction part of the plan, he’s sure as hell bringing along his Ace-in-the-hole in her low-cut showstopper dress. He uses the mirror to take in her beauty without the kind of directness that would take his breath away completely. Gina catches his eye in the reflection.

“Do I pass muster for a Bond girl?”

Craig shrugs carelessly and teases her. “We’ll just have to make do.”

Gina laughs. “At least I’m prettier than Cort’s date.”

“Ruby’s not going to be there. Did I not explain this whole ridiculous SEAL ninja plan?”

“I meant _Eddie._ ”

Craig bends down enough to kiss the side of Gina’s mouth before she touches up her lipstick.

“In that case, I’m not so sure,” he jokes. “Eddie’s _awfully_ pretty.”

Gina turns her attention to her eye make-up, leaning closer to the mirror to make sure everything is just so. Craig knows a certain amount of her effort will be undone by the windy transfer from their ride out and onto the casino boat, but he is always dumbstruck at the intimacy of watching her routine. Gina stands up straight, tosses her hair, and turns to give Craig a peck on the cheek.

“Cort is unattached,” she tells him. “So, unfortunately for you, he has dibs.”

He watches helplessly as his wife swoops out of the room, his desire for her as full and unruly as always.

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

-

Eddie goes into the water again. It’s inevitable at this point. Mostly because the water around the casino boat was rapidly filling with panicked swimmers and Eddie is foremost a lifeguard. But also because he was spoiling for a fight, determined to land a few punches on the guy who’d beaten him and taken him on a ride with a tow rope. He’s not so deluded to think he had a fair chance on the deck of the casino boat, but in the water… well, swimming has long been the great equalizer in Eddie’s life. Even Gina is unsurprised at this point, to see Eddie pull the giant thug overboard.

By the time everything is sorted out and Craig and Garner have finished their pseudo debriefing, Cort and Eddie are huddled up together, scheming up the next big heist while they wait for their ride home. Eddie’s got a towel wrapped over his shoulders, which Cort keeps adjusting, pulling tighter around the little guy like it’s not seventy-five degrees out. Craig suspects there’s still a wad of cash concealed somewhere on his person, but can’t see the harm in making Eddie whole again, if that’s Cort’s move.

Craig finds Gina chatting calmly with a police officer on the deck of their transport. He replaces the grey wool blanket over her shoulders with his tuxedo jacket, a much better accessory with her dress. He kisses her on the mouth, a little over-the-top for them, in a public display, and when they break apart Gina laughs. Over her shoulder, Craig catches a glimpse of Eddie staring at them.

Bizarrely, he thinks of Shauni. Her tentative, hot-and-cold running forays with Eddie into romance and rebellion. Her bombshell looks and their associated powers, of which she seems only vaguely comprehending. For a young person, she has high standards and low expectations when it comes to her casual boyfriend. There’s a willingness there, to simply blow things up and storm away from the debris on her thoughtfully selected low heels. She will be “bummed out” when she talks to Jill, but only in a glancing way. The prerogative of youth. Even Eddie will go skittering away, virtually unharmed, into the next entanglement with explosive potential. Craig thinks of Shauni and wonders how she does it. Not the walking away bit. The first part, where she makes her nebulous feelings a matter of fact.


	7. Chapter 7

It’s not the first time Craig has walked in on a sex act in the showers at headquarters. It’s not even the first time he’s walked in on Cort involved in a sex act in the showers at headquarters.

Cort is stoop-necked with his front plastered to Eddie’s back. Eddie is in full-swoon, one arm raised, with the hand hooked at the back of Cort’s head, his other hand grasping at air, turning into a fist with uncharacteristically bad form for a fighter, thumb folded inside. Cort’s arms are similarly multi-tasking, one banded across Eddie’s chest, keeping him more or less steady on his feet. Cort’s other hand is tucked into the front of Eddie’s swim trunks. For a brief moment, Craig takes in the tableau with a kind of erotic reverence, but then Eddie makes a kind of helpless sound.

Knowing Cort, he probably immediately clocked Craig’s entrance. He’s the kind of caddish character that is aware of all available doors and less conventional exits in any room wherein he conducts himself. But Cort has no shame, and  latent exhibitionist tendencies, so he probably doesn’t give a shit either way.

Eddie’s gone quiet, but his mouth is open. Still, his eyes are half closed, and Craig could probably back his way out of the locker room without being seen, but something panicky bubbles up and he dumbly stutters an audible apology. At the sound, Eddie jolts out of Cort’s grasp, but Craig is quicker. He’s out of the locker room before Cort can make a crack about a lost bar of soap.

Later, in the Pomeroy’s kitchen, Craig is not fast enough.

“I guess we should talk… about… _what you saw_ ,” Eddie says, thinking they are alone in the apartment.

It’s an unexpected foray, and hats off to Eddie, for having the balls to say anything at all. Craig was prepared to bury everything down deep and never speak of it again. It takes him a minute to understand what’s being said and then he’s much too slow to wave Eddie off.

“What did he see?” comes Gina’s voice from behind a canvas.

Craig winces. Then, despite himself, he laughs at the horror that swipes across Eddie’s face. He even feels the beginnings of a snide grin in return, tugging at the corner of his mouth before the pleading anxiety directed his way guilts him out of doing any kind of teasing.

Gina walks into Eddie’s view, wiping her hands on a rag and smiling warmly at her beloved sub-lessee. There’s not a homophobic bone in Gina’s body, but there’s no way for Eddie to know that. If that’s what he’s worried about. There’s always the chance he’s more concerned about her severe reservations concerning anything whatsoever to do with Cort.

“Lawyer-client confidentiality,” Craig cites. “Not that Eddie has ever provided me with a proper financial retainer for my services...”

“You boys are on a caper again?” Gina sighs. “I’ll alert the hospitals and the Coast Guard.”

Sheepish gratitude is starting to be a familiar look on Eddie. He nods subtly at Craig and shambles off to his room before Gina can interrogate anyone.

Of course, Craig tells her. Gina is his sounding board for everything. No case law intricacy, no ridiculous beach drama, no minor emotional twinge in Craig’s life passes by without at least brief conference with his wife. There’s a moment, when they’re getting into bed, that he thinks about keeping this one for himself to process, if only temporarily, until he knows what he feels about it, but then Gina, in the course of her gentle prying, says: _It’s just us. Eddie’s in his closet..._ And Craig starts giggling hysterically.

Gina gives the information a much more somber treatment when she learns about the locker room handjob. Her voice is hushed, though the walls of Eddie's literal storage closet are virtually soundproof.

“He _didn’t_ ,” she gasps. “What’s happened with him and Shauni?”

“I don’t know,” Craig says, inadvertently matching her volume.

He has given it some thought in the last few hours and he can’t remember anything amiss. Eddie generally keeps him up to date on the barometer of that relationship. He thinks about how beautiful and talented Eddie and Shauni are, how brilliantly they seem to spark off one another. They are indisputably the brightest up-and-coming stars on the beach. Their story will be indelible in Baywatch lore no matter what happens. He thinks of how confident they are in what they want, how forthright their disagreements are. It’s possible that outside people want more out of the relationship than either of the parties involved.

“Maybe nothing happened. I think that might be more of an intermittent, mutually-beneficial, ad hoc arrangement kind of thing,” he says.

“Do you think she knows what’s going on?”

“I don’t even think Eddie knows what’s going on. He seems a bit… not himself.”

“It’s a Cort thing,” Gina scoffs.

“Yeah. A Cort thing.”

In other words, a mess. There are no consequences for Cort, and Eddie has faced consequences for the actions of many careless people already in his lifetime. Cort wouldn’t know a boundary if he had both his hands down its shorts. Craig remembers returning from New York and being slightly insulted when Cort made zero attempt at his usual lechery towards Craig’s new wife. But that was less about Cort respecting a boundary and more about Gina being the kind of formidable that strikes fear in the hearts of certain kinds of men.

“Are you disappointed in him?”

“He’s a continual source of disappointment,” Craig says. “The first time I am not at least slightly disappointed in Cort, I’ll let you know. That will be an occasion.”

“I mean Eddie.”

Craig is glad the dim room masks his facial journey from confused to thoughtful to carefully composed blankness. He never seems to get it when Gina or Mitch is asking him about Eddie. Maybe Craig just assumes everyone holds the same sort of regard, that’s rampant enough to be a sort of constant background static. It's never about Eddie (It's always about Eddie).

“Why would I be disappointed in him? He’s young and having fun. He can do what he wants.”

His voice doesn’t even sound convincing to his own ears. Gina kisses him, a quick peck before she flops over and starts her endearing cozy burrowing routine. When she’s satisfied with her nest, she folds the blankets down under her chin and looks back over her shoulder at Craig.

“It’s okay, you know, to have impossible feelings for someone.”

If he lives to a hundred, nobody will ever understand Craig as well as Gina does.

When he and Eddie have their fight, the phrase comes back to him: impossible feelings. Craig selects from a menu of possible feelings instead. He goes with anger at Eddie being immature, for disrespecting Shauni, and endangering all the progress he has made, no, all the _achievements_ in his life of late. Eddie argues that living life more like Craig, or at least in a way that meets with Craig’s approval, is not an _achievement._ Frustration is a possible feeling when Eddie packs his meager belongings up and leaves the apartment. Regret is a given.

 “He’s really gone,” says Gina, when she comes home to a confused and agitated husband sitting in an empty storage room.

“Yep.”

“Do you want me to find him and talk some sense into him?”

Craig shakes his head. There’s a hole in the wall where the bracket for Eddie’s speed bag used to be attached, a space where they’d neatly cut away drywall so Eddie could tie into the 2x4 stud. He truly doesn’t have to come back to the apartment for anything.

“No. It’s probably better for everyone if he does his own thing.”

“As long as it’s not a Cort thing,” she frets.

“Everything’s a goddamn Cort thing,” snaps Craig.

It turns out the feeling of one’s fist, passing through the weakened drywall near an exposed 2x4 stud, is also within the realm of possibility.


	8. Chapter 8

He’s working something out again, about work balance, about being in an office, being on a beach. Craig doesn’t have a social life. Baywatch had always been enough for him that way, working alongside his best friend and surrounded by even more of his long-running friendships. There’re the pinballs, like Cort, who bounce in and out of the picture, as long as Mitch and Craig are holding the fort. And there are the new friends, the budding relationships. Craig is working something out again, and this time it’s tied up in Eddie.

Gina can’t help. She knows, probably better than Craig does, what to do. But she’ll let him come around to it himself. Even with the tremors, she still wants Craig to go on the diving trip. Nothing is ever difficult with Gina. Eddie, on the other hand…

They’re not fighting. They’re not even avoiding one another. But there’s a coolness to Eddie now that is entirely uncharacteristic. It’s not ruining the beach for Craig, but it’s drawing attention to something about himself that he doesn’t like, an arrested state of being, maybe. He knows what he gets out of lifeguarding, but he’s starting to wonder what it’s causing him to miss.

The law and order part of him is offended by the unfairness of it all. He’d finally done it, after years of back and forth he’d found the balance. And the balance was ocean-heavy, guarding-heavy, adventure-heavy. But that was all different now. Eddie was there. In the ocean, in the lifeguarding, in the adventure. Craig was starting to feel out the edges of his feelings towards Eddie, and the knowledge that they were not reciprocal. The balance was no longer stable.

Diving is a perfect setting for working things out. The silence, and the serenity in being held by the ocean. The atmosphere of discovery leads Craig’s mind down all sorts of avenues in search of his answers. In a strange way, diving with Cort is relaxing. When Cort’s not tangling with pirates or mobsters, he’s a very competent, very independent soul. Wordless communication makes his company downright enjoyable. Underwater, they are more alike than not, and it’s an easy companionship. Maybe easier than anything with Mitch, or Gina, and certainly Eddie. Cort doesn’t ever need anything from Craig, Craig doesn’t ever need anything from Cort. The body language for “check out this cool bit of reef” is inherently understood and has no meaning beyond, “check out this cool bit of reef”.

But John D. Cort is still a lightening rod for drama. Poisonous gas is about par. Finding the source is a sensible course of action in Cort’s world. It’s not like they have a boat to return to, because, oh yeah, that’s an explosion waiting to happen. By the time the earthquake hits again, Craig is nearly resigned to dying, buried in rubble in an air pocket with Cort. They talk to keep their minds off of their probable demise, but Craig is moreso horribly worried about Gina, and Cort seems to sense that idle chitchat about television shows from their childhoods is not going to cut it, distraction-wise.

“You never asked about me and Eddie,” he says.

It works. Craig is distracted. He plays dumb and his actual surprise at the abruptness of topics adds to his acting ability.

“What about you and Eddie?”

“You never even asked what we were getting up to, even after… I mean, that was what you two fell out over, wasn’t it?”

“We didn’t fall out,” says Craig.

“Sure,” says Cort. A pleased smirk spreads across his face. “I swear, the sounds I could pull from that kid’s mouth…”

“Please don’t.”

“What? If we're gonna die down here, we should at least be talking about something nice. Something we both appreciate.”

“Piss off, Cort.”

“Ask me.”

Craig picks up a loose rock and considers bashing Cort’s face in, or at least smashing it into his own skull just for the blessed silence of a sudden coma. Instead he throws it into the water, watches the splash and the ripples expanding out in circles until the water laps at his legs.

“You and Eddie were fucking,” he deadpans. “Congrats.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be that crude about it, and we never… well, what you saw was about the extent of things. I mean, except that we weren’t always interrupted.”

Cort looks pleased with himself. Craig looks for another fist-sized rock.

“I thought he was serious about being with Shauni. I thought he was in love,” he says.

Cort actually shrugs.

“He is in love. He’ll be with her as long as she’ll have him.”

“And that business in the showers?”

“Sometimes she’s not having him.”

“I was just starting to like you again, as a person,” says Craig, but Cort is ignoring him.

“Did you see that?”

And then they’re able to make contact with Mitch, and the horrible burden of hope is placed on them. Once he finds out Gina is okay, all Craig can think about is how disappointed she will be with him if he doesn’t make it out of this alive. Then Mitch is counting down and they’re yelling at him to get it over with. Craig is back to the unfairness of it all. He’d had such a good thing going. The thrill of the rescues, the Zen of the beach. When lifeguard dramas kicked in, he had his other job, his other life, where rescues were a lot more subtle and research was his meditation. And then Eddie came along and Craig got swept up in the romance of guarding again, the heroes and legends of the towers. Watching how Eddie’s life was transformed by it was an inspiration, but also, temptation. It wasn’t fair, but it was going to be settled either way, _in 3… 2… 1…_

Mitch did his best to blow them up, without _blowing them up_ and Craig found himself fighting the debris, his head ringing, disoriented, surrendering. Cort’s hands found him, connected with his back, and shoved Craig hard in the right direction until he clued in. Chase the bubbles that lead to the surface. Then light, so much light. They bobbed up on the surface like corks, and even over the roar of the helicopter rotors, they could make out Mitch’s cheers.

Craig yells, although if Cort’s ear are ringing anything like his own, there’s no way to make out exact words from his shout on the water.

“I love Eddie.”

Cort just looks at him strangely, but ultimately nods as if he’d heard the words.

“I think Gina and I are going to move back to New York,” he adds, not even bothering to yell this time.

Another nod of impossible understanding. Cort looks concerned, nervous, like he thinks maybe Craig has been knocked senseless by a falling boulder in the explosion. And maybe he has.


	9. Chapter 9

He hears news about Baywatch all the time, during that first year working in New York. Craig keeps in touch with Mitch, of course. He hears about the wild saves and the new edition lifeguards. Every other story seems to involve Eddie, which awkwardly triggers whatever unresolved tension can be carried over phone lines and through scattered handwritten letters. Mitch handles it about as gracefully as a bulldozer.

_You probably don’t want to hear about this one, but Once Upon A Time Cort showed up on the beach, on a motorcycle, just in time to save Eddie’s ass from a violent gang fight…_ starts one particularly absurd letter.

But Craig _does_ want to hear about that one. He wants to hear about everything. Mitch’s letters, despite atrocious errors in spelling and grammar, would make an amazing book if published as a collected memoir. And yet, there is so much missing, so many voids that Craig’s imagination can’t fill in. Craig’s new life is sedate, boring by comparison, and he half-heartedly tries to convince Mitch that things are better that way, but they both know he doesn’t believe it.

Gina, bless her perfect loving heart, has kept in touch with Eddie. Craig acts like he’s not interested in the side of the conversations he can hear (Always Gina phoning Eddie-- their long-distance friendship subsists on Craig’s dime). When mail shows up from Eddie (return address in care of Baywatch, because evidently Eddie still has housing issues) Craig acts like he’s not just waiting until the first opportunity with Gina out of the house to find the letters and read them, several times over.

Like the man himself, Eddie’s letters are vastly shorter than Mitch’s, and improbably worse in terms of spelling. The handwriting is criminally bad, but Craig gets used to it. Loves it, actually, _Eddie’s writing._ Considering his feelings towards anything remotely like schoolwork, and how much effort has clearly been spent on each sentence, any writing from Eddie is a gift. The furiously scratched out mistakes set Craig’s heart aching more than any poem he’s ever read.

Eddie never asks after Craig, though Craig knows that Gina always mentions him in her responses. Gina always knows what people _need_ to hear, whether they want to hear it or not. Maybe it’s Craig’s imagination, but there’s also something tentative in the letters, an uncertainty. Eddie can detail an accomplishment, an amazing save, a carefully considered life change, and always sound like he’s looking for approval. And not Gina’s approval. Gina has been unwaveringly supportive and affirmative of Eddie since the moment they met. In Craig’s mind, Eddie is reaching out for _him._ Why wouldn’t he? After all the times Craig pulled him out of trouble. Now that Craig is desperate to know how Eddie is doing, is it so unfathomable that Eddie wants to let him know that he’s doing okay?

About a year in, the letters stop entirely.

Gina had mentioned the Australia exchange. Craig assumed the phone calls would dry up for the exchange term, for the sake of their long-distance bill if nothing else, but he waited for a letter for a long time before he realized that those had stopped too.

It’s months after the fact that Mitch lets slip something about the beach wedding. And Craig…

Well, for once, Craig is nothing but happy. For Eddie, for Shauni, for himself. Eddie, who had never set foot outside of Philly before the long bus trip all the way to tryouts, who had never had anything resembling a functional, safe, or secure family; was living on another continent, was having a successful career, was _married._

He wants to talk to someone about it. Not Gina, or Mitch, at once cloying and dismissive with their unneeded sympathy: _Poor old Craig doesn’t know how to have feelings. We have to tell him what he feels about this. We have to break it to him gently._  

No, what Craig needs to do is talk to someone like John D. Cort. But he is increasingly difficult to track down these days, and then when he finally turns up at their Connecticut house, live and in person for one night only, Cort doesn’t say much as he systematically demolishes the Pomeroy’s liquor cabinet.

Cort has problems of his own, see, and he’s no longer taking applications for temporary sidekicks. He still doesn’t need anything from Craig, even though Craig now needs something from Cort. So Craig does the crazy thing, this time. He asks for help.

Cort does not know how to reach Eddie in Australia. He does, for some no doubt dubious reason, have a phone number for a guy who captains an Australian salvage ship. And the guy that captains the salvage ship, it transpires, has the number for a marine life preservation organization. And that marine life preservation organization has the number for the marine biologist’s lab where Shauni McClain-Kramer works as part of a university credit program.  

After a very excited, high squealing earful from Shauni McClain (not McClain-Kramer, it turns out, since that wasn’t Eddie’s birth name anyway, and he didn’t feel compelled to impose it on anyone else), Craig gets the number for the dispatch office where Eddie will be signing out from his guard shift in a little less than an hour. Shauni’s excitement is almost overwhelming.

“Oh my God. Craig Pomeroy. I can’t believe it. You have to call him. He will freak out. He’ll be over the moon. You have to call.”

He does call. And despite the fact that he has spent hours tracing his convoluted game of telephone tag around the coastline of Australia, the accent on the answering end of the call is jarring. It’s as though he’d stupidly expected Eddie to pick up the phone on this final leg of his phone journey. Instead, some Aussie guy talks slowly at him, like he’s a dangerous crazy person, letting Craig down gently but firmly, because Eddie Kramer isn’t there at the moment, and no, he can’t give out any personal contact information. But Craig is relieved, honestly, and not in anyway hostile or deserving of the defensive posture.

There’s some commotion off the line. Some laughter echoes on the other side of the planet from Craig. He guesses he’s now a joke at lifeguard headquarters all around the world. There’s rustling, more laughing, then quiet, a pause to span the Pacific Ocean, to cross over the equator.

“Um. Hello?”

_…the earth quakes… the pier topples... the waves crash in... the engines catch fire... the barfight erupts... the sea mine detonates... the Jeep explodes... the underwater cave collapses…_

_Craig breaks the surface._

The voice might be a little huskier than Craig remembered. The extra year, or maybe it’s just been a long day of, in their old shared parlance, _pulling them out like tuna._

“Hello?” The voice repeats. “Listen, if this is some kind of joke…”

Craig laughs, a hysterical burst, and then, quickly: “No, Eddie. No. Hey. Don’t hang up.”

An audible gasping sound, like a whimper broken in two, and then: “Craig?”

“Hey, pal.”

“What the hell is… oh, God, is Gina okay? Is it Gina? Is it Mitch?”

The alarm in his voice is precious. Never a throwaway joke when the life at stake is not his own, when something concerns the well-being of someone Eddie cares about. And Mitch has to be a lot more careful going forward, because it probably would be left to Craig to make that phone call. Craig winces, feels terrible for causing the panic. He thinks of all the times that last year in California, pressing his steady hands to Eddie’s shoulders, his flanks, anything to ease the anxiety, the insecurities that plagued the rookie that Eddie had been. What he wouldn’t give to be able to touch Eddie now. Easy reassurance for both of them.

“Everyone’s fine,” he says. “Everything is fine. I was only calling… I was… I just…” He sighs. “Hi, Eddie.”

Relieved laughter down the line.

“Hi, Craig.”

“I think… maybe there are some congratulations in order. Long overdue.”

“What makes you think that?” says Eddie.

“I don’t know. Just a—”

“Lawyer’s hunch,” they finish in concert.

A pause follows, the space where, a year and a half ago, they would have exchanged friendly punches. Craig wishes he had opened a bottle of beer before this last leg of phone sleuthing.

“Jesus, Craig. There’s _so_ much…”

Uncertainty breaks in Eddie’s voice, more panic surfacing, but of a different, less manageable sort. He’s choked up. It could have been a declaration. There’s so much, period, end of sentence. Craig hears him, sotto voice, telling the Aussie dispatcher that he’s okay, telling him to scram. Then back into the phone:

“Can you talk for a while?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” says Craig, which is hilarious, considering the thousands and thousands of miles, not to mention the years they’d had to put between them just to get to this conversation. And considering the move Craig is currently debating. That part comes up later.

“Did Gina tell you I got a huge job offer in Washington?”

“DC?”

“Yeah.”

“Too bad. For a second I thought you were at least heading back west.”

“Too bad?”

“Yeah. Well, I think we’re going to stay on here for another couple years. Shauni’s finishing her degree. But I always thought we’d all kind of wind up back… by the beach. At least get together once in a while. Show up randomly just to hang out.”

“Like a Cort thing,” Craig says.

“Not like a Cort thing at all,” says Eddie.

They talk for hours. Eddie’s voice turns raspy, the huskiness from before was the start of a cold. Twice Craig holds the line while Eddie runs off to get a glass of water. The dispatch office is closed for the night, a dark and peaceful place to talk, as Eddie describes the scene.

“So, I guess I’ll see you around,” Craig says, when they’ve run out of things to say. “Randomly. On the beach. To hang out.”

It’s as bittersweet as it gets. He knows they won’t see each other again. The Washington thing is a whole new world for him and Gina, where the secondary job is more of the same, an entire afterhours work shift of politics and posturing, masquerading as a social scene. He wanted this, to for once not be torn between the sand and the suits. And now, to know Eddie so settled on the other side of the coin, is happy. It’s Gina’s turn to have the life she wants them to live, no more sand tracked in and scuffing her canvases. No more long quiet days in the house while Craig is working in the city. It’s time for something all-encompassing and new.

“You could visit,” Eddie says. “Anytime while we’re living here. I’ll show you around. If I’m pulling shifts, you can back up a beach with me. Like old times.”

“I would love that.”

“You won’t visit, though.”

“Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t love it.”

“How can you know that you’d love something if you don’t actually do it?”

“I don’t…”

Craig loses his train of thought. Gina pads barefoot past the door to his study, wearing one of her silk nightgown things. She is stunning, in a new way. Polished. She used to just sleep in one of Craig’s old t-shirts, paint spattered and laundry-worn, with the LA County Lifeguard shield over her heart.

“Craig?” Eddie prompts him.

“I guess, like Gina says, it’s okay to have impossible feelings.”

“O…kay?”

“I miss you, Eddie.”

“You miss the beach.”

“Same thing.” Craig shrugs, though Eddie can’t see.

Some days, the beach is everything to him. Not this cold Atlantic excuse. The real southern California deal. He still has the dreams, where he’s pulling Eddie out of the water, holding him safe and warm on the sand. He wonders if he can still make a rescue can spin on the palm of his hand, if he can throw it pinwheeling through three full rotations before he catches it again. He wonders if Eddie still has the suspiciously extensive tan, for a guy who categorically despises speedos. What does the uniform even look like over there? Eddie had personally fought for the board-style trunks that came into style at Baywatch after Craig left town. He’d seen them on him once, low slung on Eddie’s remarkably narrow hips. If he’d been wearing the standard trunks that time, would they both still be at Baywatch? The flat front boardshorts had shown off the angle of Cort’s hand, the open drawstring, Eddie’s arousal, all too clearly.

“I miss y—” Eddie almost says ‘you guys’ or ‘you two’. Craig knows it from the inflection, but he corrects himself, starts again. “I miss you, Craig.”

“Give my love to Shauni. Be good to each other.”

“Take care, Craig.”

And that was it.

 

 

 

 

~~~ ~~~  ~~~~

~ ~~\o/~~ ~~

~~~  ~~~ ~~

 

 

 

 

And that would have been it.

Except that, a little more than three years later, a stubble-jawed, bleary-eyed, thoroughly-sloshed menace turns up in DC. He ruins Gina’s cocktail party, insulting the politician guest of honor, sending the self-proclaimed dignitaries scurrying for the door.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Gina shouts, when it’s just the three of them left.

It’s the first raised voice, the first emotion shown outside of the measured talks of their self-administered marriage counselling-slash-wine tasting sessions. If Gina showed this much passion for anything else in their newly complicated life, Craig could try to understand, could maybe debate things until whatever was broken fell back into place. Things are not working with him and Gina. They’re together all the time in DC, yet further apart than ever. This ruggedly handsome, but seriously filthy and foul-smelling interloper might just be the thing to kick them up and out of their current rut.

Craig has never been happier to see John D. Cort in his life.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote two endings that loosely followed canon. But canon on that show never followed canon, so I decided why not have both? But it made the thing too long, so now there be eleven chapters, and eleven chapters there be.

10.

Gina stays in the art world but takes a job on the business side of it. She turns out to be an incredibly effective fundraiser. Craig is not surprised at her success, Gina is one of the most capable people he’s ever met, but he is still impressed by it. At first, Gina approaches the work like a renegade, taking great joy in the act of separating the stodgy old Washington rich from their money. But Gina winds up liking some of her marks, befriends them. She’s always been able to see the good in everyone. And she is busy, fulfilled, content.

Craig doesn’t notice when she stops painting, until one day he is looking at her and can’t remember the last time she had an errant fleck of paint in her eyebrow or smudged under a fingernail. Her studio has become more of an office. And while she always liked an _event,_ she used to be an outside observer. Now she is happily immersed neck deep in the social striving. She wears power suits and glamourous gowns in equal measures, and she likes it.

Craig still walks in the door with his necktie shoved into a pocket, his jacket missing, his shirt wrinkled and unbuttoned. He has cut his hair way down at least. Gina says it looks better short now that it’s thinning. And the style at his office is tight and neatly combed. His suit pants used to wind up folded at the cuffs and weighed down with sand from beach walk brainstorming. Now his suits are so expensive, it’s a shame to even sit down in them. He takes up marathon distance running, but instead of the daylight beach runs he used to stretch out and relish, he now favors punishing 5am runs in the rain, and even snow. He is doing okay, he tells people. Washington types mistake that for him being coy about his modestly six-figure salary. What Craig really means is that’s he’s doing okay. Doing just okay.

Cort’s unexpected appearance at the fundraising soiree and the ensuing chaos is the most fun Craig has had in months. Maybe in years.

Not everyone is as enthusiastic.

  _“Are you fucking kidding me?”_

Then, _“How did he even find us?”_

Craig hates the way Gina asks, demanding a real answer, when he knows years ago, she would have asked the same question rhetorically, with bemusement, as if Cort’s roguish interruptions were a charming mystery to behold. She never used to be the skeptic in their marriage. There was a time when Craig felt, with some bitterness, like he was the only one who could see through Cort and his ridiculous scheming. Now he finds himself thrilled at the prospects.

Cort has absolutely outdone himself in terms of drama this time. There’s a beautiful young woman, a corrupt FBI agent, connections to the White House. There’s an explosion on a boat on the Potomac, and an office building fire in Bethesda. The whole thing lasts three days and at the end, Cort and Craig have had a part in exposing a Senator’s ties to human trafficking.

The newspapers call it an earth-shattering scandal. Gina calls it a midlife crisis. Cort calls it a three-day weekend. To Craig it feels just like surfacing after an underwater explosion, in the smoke and debris, the wash of a helicopter pressing down on him. _Alive. Alive! Alive?_

Don’t get him wrong. Physically, he feels like absolute garbage for about a week after. He’s way too old for Cort-level James Bond by way of Peter Pan shenanigans. But there could be a happy medium somewhere, right? Cort is going to see more with his failing eyes than a normal person could see in fifty lifetimes. Craig, in a fit of dizzy admiration, tells Cort that he loves him. Cort, completely unaware of the pop culture plagiarism of it, says _“I know.”_

Cort used to do this really stupid thing. Well, not so much really stupid when you consider the monumental size of stupid that he’s capable of. But a silly thing. A small thing. In the old days. He used to pick up a handful of sand when you weren’t looking. You’d be zipping your wetsuit or writing on a clipboard or opening tower shutters and not paying him much attention. Then he’d bump his fist at you, floating it around the chest or arm and simply say “Here, hold this.”

And no matter how many times you’d fallen for it, you’d hold out your hand, like he was going to drop a set of car keys into it. Like he was handing you a ballpoint pen. It was always such a casual, obvious gesture, that nobody ever questioned it. He’d open his fist and the sand rained down into your waiting hand. It would catch you off-guard almost every time, and you’d rush to cup a second hand under the first, make panicky moves to try not to spill the precious sand before you caught on to the joke. That your brain could be so easily manipulated. That you were so blindly sleepwalking through the day. It did something unnerving and almost menacing, like an especially engrossing magic trick. For no good reason, it always struck everyone as hilarious, this stupid little thing Cort did.

Eddie was the only one who never fell for it. He’d go along with the premise, holding his hand out absentmindedly, but then the moment the sand came down he’d whip his open palm towards Cort, redirecting the sand at his face. Cort would tackle Eddie and they’d get into the weirdest long-short mismatched wrestling scrum. And of course, there was the surf trip, where Craig was in the process of falling for it. Cort opened his hand to release the sand into Craig’s, and Eddie had pantsed him instead. They could always be such irritating shitheads together.

_Here, hold this._

They’re in Craig’s study when he does it, unwinding after the Major Scandal/Midlife Crisis/Long Weekend. They are sitting in the matching leather armchairs that Craig had bought with naïve optimism, in case he ever wanted to have one of his new Washington friends over for a drink. This had been before he realized that you meet with Washington friends in either trendy clubs or back alleys, depending on the social capital associated with being seen with you that particular week.

“Here. Hold this,” says Cort.

He has a beer in one hand. They are drinking their refreshments out of the bottles, not the appropriate glassware that Gina has begrudgingly set out for them. Cort’s other hand is held out in a fist in Craig’s general airspace. Craig, unthinking, offers his palm to catch the proffered keys, pen, loose change, whatever item his brain instinctively expects.

A crumpled and discolored scrap of paper drifts into the palm of Craig’s hand. Cort grins at him. He smooths it out, and for a brief giddy moment imagines how brilliantly surrealist it would be if the word ‘sand’ was just written on it. But there’s something else. Eddie’s name, underscored where the space would go, the snail of an “at” symbol, a dotcom.

“I don’t do computers,” drawls Cort. “I figured you probably do the e-mail thing, though.”

Of course, he does the e-mail thing. If there’s one good thing about the Washington firm, it’s that they have all the latest technology. Craig has work e-mail and personal e-mail, online filing and billing software, and a website he can log-on to, to wistfully search for jobs he’ll never take in places he’ll never go to.

“You still talk to Eddie?”

Craig is surprised. He’d heard through the grapevine that Shauni’s career had taken off. That the down under relocation had become permanent. He’s gripped with panic at the possibility that Eddie has been stateside all along and somehow, he’d missed it.

“Sure. I visited him a couple times, passing through Australia.”

He says it like Australia is the kind of place you can happen to pass through, like a particularly convenient train station or airport hub.

He adds in a smarmy tone. _“We reconnected.”_

“And how did his wife feel about that?”

“You know Shauni and Eddie. Even married, they’re still doing the on and off thing. It was decidedly off when I was there.”

“That’s awful.”

Cort lifts his beer in front of his face, into his narrowed field of vision, and takes an unconcerned swig. Craig sips his drink slowly.

“They’re fine,” says Cort. “They’re happy either way. They always had that freaky incest vibe thing going anyways.”

Craig chokes. Cort laughs.

“You never saw it? Donny and Marie sometimes. Anyways, Eddie’s better with a little action on the side. He gets too overprotective when he’s all wrapped up in Shauni. Overprotective and way too intense. It’s suffocating... hey, I guess that means you did teach him something, after all.”

Cort goes to deliver a chummy backhand swat to Craig but misses and hits the side of his chair. There’s something a bit slapstick to the way his vision fails him. Craig expects Cort is the wrong kind of proud and cool for that to go well for very long.

“He needed that back then,” says Craig. “He used to make himself small, you know? Never asked anybody for anything. Like he wanted to escape notice, disappear himself.”

“Fair,” says Cort.

“You really got him out there, in the world, you know? For all the shit we’d give you for being a lunatic, you did do that.”

Cort looks at him like he’s speaking nonsense.

“That was you, Pomeroy. You did that.”

~

It takes him a while to get around to e-mailing Eddie. A quick note about his job and Gina’s life. He asks how things are going for Eddie and Shauni and resists the urge to type TELL ME EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERY LITTLE THING IN YOUR LIFE in desperate all-caps. Eddie responds within the day, but Craig can’t bring himself to open the e-mail at work. Gina goes to a board meeting for some art council thing the following night, and Craig dumps his microwave chicken and vegetable dinner into a cereal bowl and takes it into the study to eat at the computer.

Either Eddie reads more these days, or he’s using a spellchecker, because the e-mail is a vast improvement over the handwritten letters of years ago. He says he’s glad Craig got hold of him. He says he knew Cort would never write an e-mail, but he’d hoped, in a sort of roundabout way, that it would somehow lead to Craig getting in touch. It’s such an Eddie-like determinism, such message-in-a-bottle confidence, that Craig laughs out loud reading that part. Eddie is still the kind of walking contradiction who believes that what is meant to be will be, but he’ll still buckle down and work his ass off all the same.

From there, their correspondence flourishes. The next years are filled with daily e-mails, much longer than anything Eddie used to carry on with Gina via phone and postage. They talk about the old days, and Eddie’s life, mostly. Craig tries to be guarded on his side of things. He’s a bit embarrassed, maybe, at the level of dissatisfaction in his life, ashamed at what he’s become, the compromises he makes. He starts to spend a lot of late nights in his study, waiting for the e-mail from Eddie to arrive so he can read it a few times, sleep on it, and mentally compose his response during his morning run. He thinks about their conversations throughout the day, to the point where he is almost distracted at work.

Gina asks, maybe even seriously, if he is having an affair. Craig laughs, reassures her. But when she comes across Eddie’s e-mail address (Craig never got around to writing it into his address book. He knows it by heart, but he never threw away the scrap of paper from Cort, either) she asks if he talks to Eddie, a note of surprise in her voice, maybe a tremor of hurt, even. And Craig lies and says no, not really, he hasn’t talked to Eddie for years. Meanwhile, in his head, he’s started thinking of e-mail as a shortened form of Eddie-mail.

Craig is not proud of the fact that he uses the correspondence with Eddie as an escape, a shiny and new avenue of self-expression to fill the places in his life that have gone cold with Gina. He justifies it to himself. Gina’s got so many friends, so many close relationships with young artists, female and male, who she has taken under her wing, and she has no energy left for Craig.

Craig has no energy left, period. He still runs too many miles in a week, but his appetite is gone. He loses so much weight that his expensive suits start to look sloppy in their tailoring. Work, E-mail, Sleep, Run, Work. He doesn’t know about the lymphoma waiting in his near future when he and Gina separate, but it explains some things. How something so elemental to your being can mutate, can twist and fester inside of you, and drain away your life.

Craig washes back up on his old beach, lost and searching. It was never going to go any other way.

~

He’s just getting over the aching Gina-shaped void in his life when he has a check-up back in DC. He was mostly stopping in to have his patient file sent to LA, but he’s slightly overdue for a physical, and he’s had a kind of pain in his neck, as it turns out, in lymph node territory. He gets the test results days after Gina takes his name off the deed to their house. He tells her first anyways. When she stops crying, he jokes that he traded one pain in the neck for another. She starts bawling. When she shows no such sign of emotion weeks later, signing the final paperwork to dissolve their marriage, Craig knows they’re doing the right thing.

Back in California, he struggles to tell anyone. He’s been deluding himself, living like a kid, like it’s the summer between undergrad and law school all over again. He’s not reimagining a life for himself without Gina, he’s trying to relive the life he had before Gina came along. He barely e-mails Eddie anymore, too ashamed to explain about the divorce. Terrified to infect Eddie with the burden of the c-word.

The crazy thing is, before his trip to DC, he’d caught sight of his reflection in the glass outside headquarters; April beaming into his face, him in his Baywatch jacket, his swim trunks. His hair wasn’t thinning. He was as slim and trim as ever. He’d caught himself smiling. And for a moment he recognized, in the reflection, himself at 22 years old.

Now, the illusion shattered. Given enough time, his cells have mutated and spun their cancerous thread. He is an old fool. His slimness is his wasting. His euphoria is his fever and insomnia. He returns after treatment a chastened man. The beach welcomes him home, but it’s been a smoggy day, the sunset is made beautiful, purple and orange, with carcinogenic atmosphere.

He does okay for a few days. He gets back into the gym. He eats a bit more. But he doesn’t gain back any weight. The morning workouts take too much out of him for him to carry a shift in the same day. He eventually tells Mitch. He is still numb from the whirlwind that has been his diagnosis and treatment, and he botches the reveal. Mitch gets upset. But one fog-soaked shark scare, one military police arrest later, they’re okay.

Craig acknowledges that, yeah, he has some bad days. Exhausted days. There’s a wave pattern, an ebb and flow of lifeforce that he hasn’t quite mastered yet. He admits that, well, maybe he shouldn’t take any tower assignments for a while.

Mitch gives him a month off. (Mitch forces him to take a month off). It’s supposed to be a month off from lifeguarding, but Craig takes a month off from lawyering, too. He finally gets around to replacing his DC wardrobe with shorts and sandals. He teaches himself to cook a few decent dinner options. He takes long jogs on the beach at sunset, while the sand is still hot on his feet. When Mitch assigns himself to a tower, Craig spends most of the day hanging around, keeping him company, taking swims, doing some people watching, a lot of ocean watching.

He e-mails Eddie. It’s the longest e-mail he’s written in his life. He types it on his laptop, sitting on a folding chair on the balcony of his postage stamp-sized crappy apartment, where the only thing to recommend the neighborhood is a sliver view of the beach in the distance. Maybe the humble apartment was another nod to his youth, and the way things were his first summer at Baywatch, but it also suits him now.

He starts the e-mail to Eddie by trying to explain a year-old case, about his client’s insistence to rightfully die on the beach. Craig knows he’s messing it up, he’s explaining it all wrong. What he’s trying to say is that everyone has a place where they return to, even if it’s not so much a place, but a sense of oneself.

What he’s trying to say is that there’s a Gina-shaped void in him. He knows it. He’s patching it every single day with an inadequate spackle made of fond memories and tentative friendship. There’s also a space for Mitch, but that’s full to the brim right now from their horrible jokes and paddleboard philosophizing and making fun of Mitch’s perpetual lovesickness. And, dammit, it turns out there is a good-sized spot for the half-blind full-scoundrel John D. Cort, too, though in a part of Craig’s self that he keeps carefully cordoned off from the lawyerly parts, for purposes of plausible deniability. There’s a space for Eddie, of course. It’s always been here.

What he’s trying to say, is that he’s a cancer survivor, and that his perspective is changing. He was so worried about speeding things up, stretching himself thin, splitting himself in two. Now he’s trying to figure out how to slow down. But he’s not really _slowing down_ , not by a long shot. His jogging in the warm evening sand is getting stronger and faster every day, but it’s more that he’s dialed into the right kinds of velocity, the right ways of shaking things up. He can’t throw himself at things fully if he’s pacing himself. Pacing himself was how he got spread so thin.

What he’s trying to say is that he’s undergone a truing of his nature. A recalibration. He knows himself and to himself he’ll be true. He’s more Craig than he’s been in a long time, and he wants to make the most of the time he has left being Craig.

What he’s trying to say is… Craig is a man who knows what he loves, even without trying it.

_But why wouldn’t he try something he knows he loves?_

He’s going to, from now on. He starts by telling Eddie what he’s been trying to say for years.

Eddie doesn’t e-mail him back. And Craig is okay with that, too. He doubts Eddie remembers that night time/morning time, Australia/Connecticut phone call and the invitation he didn’t take, that Eddie knew he wouldn’t take. It’s not like he expects the offer to be reissued. And he knows how he sounds these days, like a new age zealot, kind of, but also a little bit like a man making his nebulous feelings a matter of fact. There’s no such thing as an impossible feeling. He’s feeling it. It’s all possible. For all the spaces he acknowledges that he holds for other people, Craig has never felt so whole.

~

His last day, if it truly is to be his last day, is at the cusp of the season where the prevailing current is cold, but the sun is scalding. The chilling effect of the water takes him by surprise. But he’s more than just okay. Craig is at peace.

Mitch was covering a tower assignment for one of the part-time lifeguards who’d had a family emergency. Craig brought sandwiches around lunch time, and then set himself up with a book to read. Sitting on the deck of the tower, his feet were dangling in the air when Mitch walked down the ramp.

“Keep an extra eye on my water, would you? I’m going for a little walk.”

Craig scrambled to his feet and moved to hang the spare rescue can from the hook. He was only a few days from the end of his month’s time off. The tower is not really unmanned with Craig there.

And maybe the problem was that he was in such improbably good running shape. When he saw the girl in trouble, he was down the ramp, across the beach, and into the water before anyone had much of a chance to notice the missing can.

He’s in it now. He’s always been a smooth swimmer, narrow waist, powerful shoulders. Craig cuts through the water like he was born to do it.

Maybe he would have had a better chance if he’d shown up earlier, had a look over the water before it was full of people. Or if Mitch had as much of a rules-and-regulations, prevention-better-than-cure, ethos as Craig has.

By the time Craig reaches the swimmer, it’s evident that she’s hurt. There’s debris in the water, some wood planks held together with barbed wire. Mitch should have seen it before, investigated. Or maybe not. There’s a strange and icy current cutting through. The planks might have just arrived, or only recently been kicked up closer to the surface.

The girl has one hand tangled between two of the wire-snagged boards. Every time the water swells, the end of one of the boards hits her in the side of the head. Craig starts out trying to drag her into shallow water, but there’s too much debris. It has to be a fence or something, twisted around her body worse as she struggles.

“I’ve got it. You’re okay. I’ve got it. You’re okay.”

He says it over and over, and the girl stops flailing. She uses her free hand to push off of Craig’s shoulder. He subs in the rescue can before she can push his head under. The girl is calmed. Craig dives in to unwind some wire, to pry the boards on her wrist apart.

_Why is it so cold?_ He’s tiring too fast, his body trying to keep him warm. He’s still carrying an unhealthily low percentage of fat. His metabolism is still slightly out of whack. He’s a strong swimmer, though. He powers through.

Maybe his reaction time is lagging. The girl’s arm comes free and as she kicks away, her foot hits one end of a board. The other end of the board catches Craig directly under the chin. He sees stars. He pushes himself up enough to see that the girl with his rescue can is making slow progress to shallow water. _At least that much went right._

Craig sinks under, dizzy and shivering. When he pulls himself up again, he sees that help is on the way. He doesn’t stop fighting, but the fighting stops. He slips under again.

Mitch swims just like Craig, smooth as a knife’s blade. The lifeguard that comes to assist is something else altogether. _Where the hell is Mitch? Some best friend._ Angry jabs in the water, the lifeguard assisting is punching the ocean with his strokes. When hands slide around under Craig’s armpits, he catches a glimpse of the kicking legs. A wet pair of jeans where orange trunks should be. The swimming style is so funny to Craig somehow, furious and self-righteous, and familiar…

_Eddie??_

He lets himself believe that it is. Even sick and hurt and, okay, admittedly probably drowning, Craig has too much sense to think it’s true. But he lets himself believe. One last gift to himself. A comfort. He closes his eyes and gives in. Either to the final hallucination of his life, or to letting himself be saved. He has time for one last thought, a very Craig-like punchline:

_My oncologist is going to be very disappointed._

 


	11. Chapter 11

When he sees the IV in his arm, he knows that it’s all back. Remission denied. The brief reprieve gone. His west coast renaissance is over before it had really begun.

Craig closes his eyes tight. He’s not going to let himself go back to the self-pitying, wallowing in the unfairness of his shortened life, but it feels like he’d barely had any time at all. He’d just started to get back on track.

The important thing is that he’d had the time to tell each of his people what they meant to him. He just wishes that it could have gone down the way he’d dreamt it. He had been at peace with that last rescue, the final swim. Out there in the surf, held in the swell of the Pacific, serene except for the aggressive chopping of water that meant that somehow, magically, Eddie was nearby. It had felt right. An unexpected adequacy at the ending of a life that, for years, hung off him like one of his DC suits that had never quite fit correctly.

Then again, maybe Craig just has the flu.

As it turns out, stupid old Craig has an ordinary flu, which he’d ignored part ways because he associated the exhaustion and aching with the residual misery of his final round of treatment. In actuality, his weakened system had simply succumbed to the same nagging bug that had hit nearly every lifeguard over the last few weeks just the same. It’s a real _welcome back, you’re one of the gang again!_ in virus form.

It’s not to say that a nasty bug is a minor thing, so close on the heels of the first weeks of remission. He’d been spiking a fever over a hundred for god knows how long, and they’re keeping him in the hospital for tests, fluids, observation... He can’t quite remember the terms they use to justify protecting him from his own idiocy. But bottom line, Craig has the simple flu, and he’s going to be alright.

He laughs at his own ridiculousness until a coughing fit overtakes him and Mitch is looking at him like he’s insane, then he closes his eyes, gently this time, and falls back asleep.

~

“I read your manifesto.”

His voice is deeper somehow. Or at least it has more of a weight behind it.

He looks sturdier too. He’s still tiny, and, God, Craig had forgotten just how _small_ he is. Craig’s memories have been influenced by the larger-than-life reputation that still echoes around Headquarters. But there is also something notably more substantial to him now, if only in the way he holds himself.

“’Morning, Eddie,” Craig rasps.

And for the briefest of seconds he can almost smell the coffee, steam billowing out of the mug as he leans against the countertops in the big modern art apartment, Gina’s adopted storage room tenant crowding in for the daily freeloading off of Craig’s caffeine stores. He’s almost right back there, with the energy to pull Eddie out of the ocean after a mishap in the morning, and the wisdom to guide him out of dry land troubles at night. Now that he has nothing of the sort left to offer, Craig isn’t sure how they’ll get on. Eddie is here. Craig wants to cry, but the IV fluids haven’t yet worked their magic.

“That’s what you’re going with? The ‘Goodbye World’ e-mail manifesto, drown yourself making a save on medical leave and then it’s just… _Morning, Eddie?_ ”

Craig coughs, winces at the ache in his neck that is decidedly not lymphatic and tries again.

“…Afternoon?”

He plays it for the laugh, but it comes out even more feebly than intended. No matter. Eddie is already on him. It’s an awkward bear hug at this incline and he realizes they’ve never even hugged before. Craig used to sling an arm casually over Eddie’s shoulders from time to time when they were chatting closely. He’d wrapped Eddie in his arms to hold him back from fifty different kinds of trouble. He’d held him in rescue holds, propped him up for first aid purposes, and hauled him around drunk or exhausted on several occasions, but he’s never before fit his arms around Eddie to return a hug. He’s never physically felt a tremor of emotion pass through Eddie’s chest before, that wasn’t of the _let me at ‘em_ variety.

“Jesus, Craig. You just can’t scare people like that.”

And Craig feels bad for the lighthearted way he’d played it, because Eddie’s got the damp-eyed scowl he gets when he’s the kind of distressed that would have a man with a less-grim early life history in tears.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

And Eddie is generous enough to just nod acceptance and sit back quietly while Craig drifts back off to sleep.

~

Craig is going home. He’s feeling better. His bloodwork came back good. Eddie is picking him up from the hospital and he’s going home. He’s thrilled at all of this until the moment he realizes that Eddie is going to see his sad little apartment. But then his own car pulls up at the hospital entrance and Eddie doesn’t ask for directions, and Craig realizes that Mitch has been conspiring against him the whole time he’s been convalescing.

“So, you’ve been to visit my palatial coastal estate, I take it.”

“I’ve been crashing on your couch.”

He’s embarrassed, but at the same time filled with a sense of giddy relief. Until Eddie had hopped out of the car at the hospital entrance, Craig had only been half-sure he hadn’t dreamt this whole scenario. He’d woken up exactly once when both Eddie and Mitch were in his room at the same time, and he’d watched carefully, for any indication that Mitch was seeing Eddie there too, that he wasn’t a hallucination.

“You’ve been sleeping on my couch? Mitch gave you my car? That was you in the water? What happened with Melbourne? And when did you get here? And where’s Shauni and--”

“Don’t short circuit, Lawbot. I’m not turning us back around.”

Another wash of relief, this time for a completely different long-held fretting. Because _Lawbot_ is a direct quote. Craig would bet all his meagre post-divorce bank account that Eddie’s been talking to Cort recently. Which means that Cort hasn’t completely self-destructed yet, despite radio silence with Mitch and Craig. There’s reassurance in knowing that Cort is staying in touch with someone. Craig knows from personal experience what a life preserver can be a correspondence with Eddie.

A horn sounds as they change lanes. The engine revs hard out of some too-sharp braking. Eddie drives suspiciously like he learned how using stolen cars. Craig can only imagine.

The sun is brilliant. Eddie’s sunglasses are big and dark. They would hide a shiner, if it was still the old days, when Eddie would get into scraps at the drop of a hat. But there’s a stillness to him now, and Craig knows Eddie’s scrapping days are mostly behind him.

“You know, you still swim like a heavyweight boxer,” Craig tells him, though fondly, as he remembers the overwhelming calm that had washed over him as he recognized Eddie’s hacking style of rescue.

He can tell the comment annoys Eddie, but the maniac behind the wheel just shrugs.

“Smooth enough to save you.”

Craig frowns.

“But how? I mean, where did you come from?”

“Your e-mail threw me for a loop. I was looking for an excuse to take some time off, make some changes. So, I took a leave from work and I caught a flight.”

Craig stares at Eddie’s profile. He hasn’t aged at all, appearance-wise, aside from the aura of substance and maturity that Craig had noticed immediately.

“Mitch knew you were coming.”

“Yeah, he thought it would be a fun surprise for you. I’d just got in and he met me on the beach when you went into the water. Guess you turned the tables. You always did hate surprises.”

Craig has another flashback when they walk into the apartment, when he sees Eddie’s modest little campsite on the sofa. Small duffle bag on the floor, small pillow and blanket folded small and piled on the coffee table, small running shoes tucked neatly by the front door. He remembers Eddie moving into the storage room way back when. It had about the same impact on the space as keeping a pet hamster, initially. But then, there had been a whole other set of consequences that loom large to this day.

“You should get some rest,” Eddie says. “I’ll go pick up some food. What do you feel like for lunch?”

“I’m not really hungry.”

“I don’t really care if you’re hungry or not.”

“In that case, you’ll find Marco right where you left him,” Craig says. Marco and his Italian sandwiches come right out of Eddie’s old neighborhood. _You can take the boy out of Philly_.

As soon as the door closes behind Eddie, Craig is collapsing onto the couch. He’s feeling better than he has felt for a while, but he’s still exhausted. He finds himself staring at the stack of bedding near his arm.

Before Eddie returns with lunch, Craig has changed the sheets on the one indulgence in his humble dwelling: the world’s most comfortable California King. Unfurling the sheets and moving around the bed exhausts him, but he smiles at his handiwork. He’s even put the little travel pillow from Eddie’s couch set-up onto one side of the vast continent of the bed. He has the duffle bag on the floor in the closet. He’s not being presumptuous, he doesn’t think. Not after that first time, long ago, when Eddie had let himself be manhandled into a similarly huge bed to sleep after the over-clocked shift.

~

“What’s up with Shauni?” Craig brings himself to ask eventually.

He is lazing in bed, mostly recuperated, but still stockpiling rest on his third day out of the hospital. Eddie is standing in the doorway to the bathroom, shirtless, with bedhead. He’s about to start shaving the weak show of stubble on his jaw and Craig is depending entirely on the answer to the question to keep himself in check. He’s recovered enough that he’s feeling a certain kind of enchanted way about everything Eddie does and says. Apparently, his shaving routine is right up there.

“Shauni,” says Eddie, with a kind of weary acceptance in his voice. “Is on a research boat in the Indian Ocean.”

She’s in a relationship, it turns out, with the very marine biologist whose office assignment had helped Craig track down Eddie all those years ago. Shauni’s absence is not the only reason Eddie had been anxious to shake up his routine and take a vacation, but it’s on the list.

“She might be in love with the work more than with him, but either way…”

Eddie’s shrug is at once magnanimous and uncomprehending. Craig thinks he knows what it means.

“Is she happy?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure she is.”

They’re quiet for a moment, one of many comfortable silences of the past few days. Eddie is looking off into space and scratching at his not-beard thoughtfully. Craig sits up, draws his knees in and wraps his arms around them.

“Are you going to shave?” he asks.

Eddie nods.

“Can I watch?”

A chuckle, a headshake.

“Suit yourself, weirdo.”

~

John D. Cort, never one to miss a party, wanders into town about a week behind Eddie. He’s in remarkably good shape, Craig figures, for how much his eyes have deteriorated. He leads them into a casual semi-criminal counter-endeavor involving counterfeit medications. He leans on Craig’s burgeoning sense of survivor’s guilt. The drugs are being sold as miracle cures to hopeless cases, bleeding people dry who might otherwise have months or years left to live in relative financial stability.

Over a million dollars and one of Cort’s old acquaintances goes missing between the time Cort tracks down the bad guys’ beach house lair and the arrival of the cops, but Craig doesn’t say anything. Weeks later, a similar sum of money will be anonymously donated to the same hospice foundation that Craig has been supporting since his close call. It’s the best they can do. The defrauded customers have no way to claim the money, and even less time to do so.

There’s a moment of déjà vu, after the fighting and before the cops arrive. The three of them with hands on knees to catch their breath, congratulatory pats on the back all around for how relatively unscathed they’ve escaped the latest Cort spectacle. It hits Craig with a wave of nostalgia, and he makes an extra effort to commit to memory the satisfied righteousness in Eddie’s posture, the reckless grin on his face.

Cort straightens up and swipes a hand through the tiny trickle of blood on his brow, then holds his hand in front of his face to see it. He looks proud.

“Barely a scratch,” he says.

He peers at each of them in the strange new way he has, his head tilted, and neck craned forward. It’s hard to say how much he can see at an arm’s length without finding the right line of sight, but he must see something, and it causes him to laugh. Eddie shoots a confused look his way, though Cort has no chance of picking up the subtly of the expression.

“Look at us,” he says. “Cancer Patient... Legally Blind... Half Pint.”

As he speaks, Cort points in turn towards Craig, at his own face, and then vaguely in Eddie’s general direction.

He is the only one finding this commentary at all funny, until Eddie grasps Cort’s still-pointing finger and gently redirects it so that it lines up to properly aim at Eddie. It’s done without malice or mockery, but the effect is hilariously ten times more savage than the “half pint” comment all the same. The three of them wind up hunched over again, this time breathless from laughing.

Later that night, Eddie lets himself into Craig’s apartment, into the bedroom, and over to what has become de facto, his side of the bed. He’s working the button fly of his jeans open when Craig comes out with it. It’s fumbling and inadequate, but they’re committed to maintaining the “E-mail manifesto” level of communication that started them off on things.

“Now that Cort’s around, do you still want to do this?”

Craig is back to his habit of reading casework in bed, but he makes sure his files are closed and set aside before he talks, nothing in the space between them. Eddie lets his pants drop and wrestles his shirt over his head before he answers, so Craig has a good feeling about tonight, at least.

“Do I still want to do what?” Eddie says.

He makes a good point. They aren’t really _doing_ anything. Craig’s e-mailed confession hangs over them, but somehow without any shame or awkwardness. Eddie doesn’t seem in any hurry to leave, to go back to Melbourne. And every night, they fall into Craig’s bed together, albeit just for sleeping. There’s definitely more touching, and while the banter continues, there’s also a disarmingly genuine, open dialogue alongside it. They get along so well, is the thing. There’s an almost discomfiting absence of friction, and Craig is wary of letting himself drift again. Leaving things unsaid and unexplored is what got him into trouble in the past.

“I’m not sure how it worked with Cort before,” he says. It’s not what he wants to say, but it’s an entry point.  The only light is from the reading lamp on Craig’s side of the bed, but Eddie smiles in the dim light and Craig can feel it.

“How it worked? There was never any work involved, with Cort.”

“Okay.”

Craig is disappointed, maybe. He knows there’s nothing but friendship between Cort and Eddie now, but he realizes he’s looking for something like an official statement to that effect. Eddie throws the covers back on his side of the bed and slides in.

“But I want to work on this,” he says. “If you can give me some time.”

“Of course,” Craig mutters, then he turns his head and smiles hard into his pillow.

It was such a seemingly innocuous statement, but all of a sudden, he’s deliriously happy. Because Craig knows what he’s always known. That nobody works as hard as Eddie.

~

Craig hangs up the phone gently. It’s unnecessary, because he pressed the button to end the call already. He’s just being as slow and deliberate as he needs to be, in this moment.

Eddie has all his worldly possessions spread out on the couch again. This time, it’s laundry day, and he’s incorporating new official Baywatch apparel into his folded piles. When Craig turns back from the phone, Eddie is trying on a familiar-but-new jacket.

“Perfect fit,” he says, pulling on the cuffs and looking over the stitching on the patches.

Craig smiles his agreement. Eddie catches the expression.

“Good news kind of phone call?”

“Gina is coming to visit,” says Craig evenly.

“That’s so great.”

It’s monotone, and Eddie’s face is a perfect likeness of Mitch’s that time when Craig served him a vegetarian burger at a barbeque, complete with the fake and bewildered smile. Eddie has already said that he can’t picture Gina or Craig with anyone except one another, despite Craig’s assurances that the divorce had been long overdue.

“I bet you anything she’s coming here to break it to me gently that she’s engaged,” Craig says.

“To the guy that only paints triangles?”

“Presumably.”

“No way. Not in a million years.”

“A hundred bucks says he got down on one knee with an isosceles-cut diamond.”

Eddie is in the midst of high school equivalency studies per Mitch’s refusal to grandfather over the hiring prerequisite. He makes a face at the vaguely trigonometric reference.

“I don’t gamble,” he says.

Craig just laughs.

“You don’t believe me? Not a single wager since the casino boat.”

Craig laughs again, remembering the ridiculous details of that particular saga.

“I believe that you think that,” he says, smiling at the look of sheer indignation on Eddie’s face.

“What the hell?”

“Okay, fine. You don’t gamble. But you do take a lot of _calculated risks,_ in life _,_ let’s say.”

Eddie smiles a sly, slightly guilty sort of grin at that, and slips out of his jacket partway, letting it catch around his elbows.

“That’s different,” he says. “But I’ll tell you what I will wager. If you’re right and I’m wrong, you can kiss me.”

“And if you’re right? If there’s no triangle-shaped invitations in the mail?”

Eddie’s eyes narrow.

“Then I get to kiss you,” he says.

Craig moves in and grabs the jacket, pulling it back over Eddie’s shoulders, and pulling him close in one smooth motion. Eddie smirks up at him, their faces inches apart, and then Craig kisses him. For a while, he’s got Eddie off-balance, basically holding him up by the lapels, but with a bit of shuffling, Eddie gets his feet under him and then he’s pressing up into the kiss. When they finally break apart, Craig clears his throat. Eddie casually rearranges his jacket, smoothing over the places where Craig’s fists had creased it.

“What was that for?” he says. “What about the bet?”

For once, Craig is pleased at how breathless Eddie sounds. He slides fingers along Eddie’s jawline, down the slope of his neck, and fixes the bit where his collar folded under itself. He smiles, taking in the sight of Eddie in day-glo Baywatch attire once again.

“I just don’t want to be responsible for encouraging your gambling addiction.”

~

Craig doesn’t like surprises, so he retaliates pre-emptively by bringing Eddie along to the airport when Gina’s flight gets in. Craig spots her instantly in the rush of people from Arrivals. She’s wearing a oversized men’s dress shirt with a stiff collar. She’s wearing the kind of jeans that let you know she’s all woman. There’s a grey streak through her hair, a single silvery stripe over her eye. She used to dye it, when Craig was in DC, but he thinks it looks good on her left as it is.

Up close, Gina looks happy. Reanimated, almost, back to her old self. When Craig hugs her and kisses her cheek, he sees a splotch of teal paint on her ear. He knows it’s from absentmindedly tucking her hair back while holding a paintbrush. There’s a bittersweet throb in his chest, but it’s interrupted by Gina screaming. She’s finally noticed the surprise guest star.

Gina launches herself on Eddie, grabbing his face in her hands and hopping up and down excitedly, so that he appears to be nodding along with her high-pitched exclamations. Craig notices the engagement ring digging into Eddie’s cheekbone and shoots him a knowing look. They congratulate her before she can get the words out. Gina links one arm through each of theirs, only letting go long enough to point Craig at the right luggage on the baggage carousel.

Eddie is working what would have been Craig’s shifts in Tower 12, so after the airport scene, it’s just the divorce duo left to catch up. Gina suggests margaritas. Craig takes her to a place near the beach, forgetting that they used to frequent it back when it was just a taco stand. He remembers hats were a thing for Gina back then, and flowers, and he remembers that the last time they’d been there for a dinner run, she had been wearing a sundress tossed over a still-damp bikini.

Gina is pressing the rolled-up sleeve of her shirt to her eyes.

“Are you crying?”

She says yes, in a tone that adds on the “you idiot” part for free.

“Why are you crying? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine, Craig. It’s just memories. You know.”

He nods. He does.

“And Eddie just looks so…” She gestures vaguely.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Nine years and he hasn’t aged a goddamn minute.”

“I know, I know. I hate him too.”

Gina laughs, finally, and turns her teary gaze on Craig’s face.

“Is he…? Are you two…?”

“Maybe. It’s too new to say.”

Gina stirs her drink with a straw and looks at Craig like he is an incomplete painting, a bit too much of the canvas showing through to her eyes. The straw takes aim like a brush, pointed in his direction.

“Let me put it a different way,” she says. “If you had to make your case in court…”

Craig slams back his own drink, brain freeze be damned, and looks Gina dead in the eyes.

“We’d be doing a life sentence,” he says. “Absolutely. Serving hard time.”

Gina stares at him for a beat, then scoffs.

“Well. There was no need to get so graphic about it.”

~

“So,” says Mitch.

Craig sees the look in his friend’s eyes and wishes he hadn’t taken him up on the homecooked dinner invitation.

“You,” says Mitch.

Craig nods, wondering how he can move things along faster.

“And Eddie.”

“So. Me. And Eddie. What? If we’re going to do this one word at a time, we’re going to need a hell of a lot more beer.”

Mitch laughs and twists off the tops of the two bottles in front of him. He holds one out for Craig but doesn’t let go of it for a moment too long.

“I told Eddie he could have Hobie’s old room here, until he finds a place to stay.”

Craig snatches the beer away and drinks some.

“And?”

“And he said he was fine in your apartment.”

“So? He’s fine where he is. Did he forget to say thanks for the offer? Is that why you’ve got a bug up your ass?”

Mitch drinks. Craig drinks. Mitch drinks more. Craig drinks more. Eventually, Mitch comes out with it, like he hasn’t just gone into suspended animation for ten minutes like a psychopath or a stroke patient.

“Your _one-bedroom_ apartment.”

Craig feels himself tiring of the way Mitch is purposefully lagging in the conversation. The only upside is that it gives him time to finish his drink.

“I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed this about Eddie Kramer, but he doesn’t tend to take up a lot of space, being, as he is, about a third of your size, you freakish ogre.”

Mitch reels back in shock. He’s gone from insinuating and teasing to dead serious in no seconds flat.

“Oh. Oh, wow.”

There’s even a kind of severity in his voice. They’re talking a grave business now.

“What?” snaps Craig.

Mitch smiles like he’s proud of Craig as one of his giant mitts comes to rest on the back of Craig’s shoulder.

“So it really is true love,” says Mitch.

Craig tells him all about it.

~

The three quasi-criminal co-conspirators are walking the beach, planning a surfing trip to celebrate Eddie’s return to Baywatch and Cort’s return to… well, Craig is not entirely sure what Cort is doing these days, but he’s doing it near the beach, and that’s cause enough for celebration in their book.

Cort is partaking in his self-prescribed medicinal marijuana, which means, per Eddie’s edict, he is staying a full five-steps behind them with his aura of smoke. It works out well that way. Cort can follow their silhouettes and enjoy the sounds and smells and sensations of the sunset, feeling his way along where the sand meets the sea, without anyone hovering patronizingly at his elbow for safety purposes.

Craig is insistent that he or Eddie should get to pick the surfing destination this time. The last time Cort planned a trip, an entire town had been razed to the ground. It seems like Craig should be winning the argument on the basis of that alone, but somehow Cort is slowly winning Eddie over.

“He’s still upset about the Jeep,” Eddie stage whispers at one point, and Cort about keels over laughing.

“Holy shit. I completely forgot that part.”

“You forgot,” echoes Craig, dubiously.

Cort flicks the remains of his ‘medicine’ into the sea. Eddie and Craig stop walking to let him rejoin them at their specific latitude.

“When you think about it, a lot of different stuff exploded that week,” says Cort. “It was a very detonation-heavy time for us.”

Eddie snickers. Even Craig has to admit that he’s right about that, at least.

A hundred yards off the beach, a convertible lays on its horn in three short blasts. They all turn to look.

“As much as I like getting romantic with the two of you, that would be my ride,” Cort says. “Here, you take this.”

Cort holds out his fist and for once Craig is in the moment. He knows what’s going to happen, but he’s feeling generous towards Cort lately and he intends to play along. He turns and reaches out, only instead of a handful of sand from Cort, he gets Eddie’s hand clasped into his own. And by the time he realizes what this means; that they’re holding hands on a sunset walk on the beach together, Cort is gone, bounding towards the parking area with a surprising amount of gracefulness for a near-blind guy.

The blonde driving the car is a knockout as young or younger than Eddie. Craig’s pretty sure he recognizes her from a recent blockbuster film.

“Is that…”

“Yeah,” says Eddie. “His new scam. Celebrity personal trainer.”

It makes a weird sort of sense. Cort has been focused on his body since he arrived back, obsessive with his fitness in a way that might be slightly overcompensating for his eyes. And Cort can get just about anybody to do just about anything, so as a personal trainer, he’s probably effective, even with the added challenge of celebrity ego.

“That sounds surprisingly wholesome, for a Cort thing,” Craig says.

“Nope. Think about it. He’s blind. He told me he has to _feel_ their _form_ when they work out _.”_

Craig shudders at the thought.

“But speaking of fitness, old man, are you going to come by Baywatch and workout with me any time soon?”

Craig has been putting off going by headquarters. He’s more or less made it official with Mitch that he’s retired from lifeguarding. Mitch made him promise to keep coming in for their traditional workouts, but Craig doesn’t want to run into too many people. He’s happy to be “just a lawyer” now, but he doesn’t like talking about it over and over. A workout with Mitch just isn’t worth it, but for Eddie…

“Yeah, tomorrow. Maybe. If this court date keeps getting bumped. You’ll have to promise to _feel my form_ for me, though.”

Eddie looks pleased with the prospect.

The convertible peels out and they look over at the departing racket. Cort is waving his stupid cowboy hat in the air like he’s a bronco rider in a rodeo or something. He is profoundly ridiculous in almost every way. Craig is just glad to see that he’s okay, glad that he’s somewhat settled in. For a while, he’d imagined Cort eventually drinking himself more blind, drinking himself out of existence, even, on a beach in Mexico. But Cort would never do that to them. He would never let Eddie down like that.

~

Eddie doesn’t need to be good at surfing. He’s a socialization surfer. He just needs to be good enough to have a fun time with his friends. Something to do with his conflicted need for community and family, that never ceases to be both heartbreaking and heartwarming.

But Eddie always was good at surfing. Right from the start he was decent enough to be, frankly, kind of annoying. Craig has had enough close calls with his life so that he would never say it, but he suspects Eddie’s natural ability on the surfboard is tied in with his naturally low center of gravity.

Cort and Craig have no such advantage, and Cort is at an increasing disadvantage as his field of vision narrows. He now does a lot of his surfing with Eddie on his six, sitting on a board ten yards back, giving a running commentary for Cort, by describing each wave as it approaches. They have a language all their own for the water, and Craig is fascinated watching their communication take place.

Occasionally Eddie goes purposefully quiet at a key moment, and lets Cort relish in his anarchist pathology, taking joy in the chaos as it unfolds around him unannounced. Cort is an eternally confused Texan in the way he tends to go against a herd, relying on an innate ability to glide over or under prevailing reality. He subverts a problem wave in the same graceful way he evades taxes and the vengeful husbands of his conquests.

Craig is the worst surfer of the three, which is absolutely insane, considering he is by far the most elegant swimmer, the smoothest rower, the most ambitious diver. But Craig is becoming philosophical about surfing in his old age, and he’s improving for it. For Craig, each wave is renewal. Personal growth sometimes looks a lot like starting over, because it is starting over. Life is an eternal series of fresh waves. Sometimes you dance with it briefly and let it go, sometimes it carries you adrift.

The waves have settled down, and they’re resting on their boards, reluctant to go into the beach and bring the day to a close. Cort is using the calmer water to practice feeling his way around the waves with his eyes closed. He drifts far enough away that Eddie and Craig feel safe from his splashing and comfortable laying back, prone on their boards. The rise and fall of the water soothes, the sun warms.

“Did you leave your keys in the Jeep?” Eddie asks quietly. He has one arm raised and thrown over his eyes to keep the glare off.

Craig laughs. It’s just nonsense. They’d driven down in a truck Eddie had inherited from the lifeguard who had recently left the country to replace Eddie at his abandoned Australian post.

“You’d think we would have learned our lesson,” jokes Craig.

Eddie drops the raised arm into the water and sends a handful of the ocean splashing towards Craig. Craig pushes the end of Eddie’s board under so that he gets a face full of water. They wrestle a bit, lazy, without moving from straddling their boards until Craig manages to get an arm around Eddie’s neck. He pulls him over, kisses him, and lets him drop into the water. Eddie sputters a bit, then hangs onto the side of Craig’s board.

“You know I was in love with you then,” he says.

He’s squinting through the water running off his hair into his face. Squinting from the sun, too, and maybe Craig is squinting back at him, but for confusing emotional reasons.

“I was in love with you, and Cort made it so you came along on that trip. And then I loved you even more after the trip. Even though you lost your mind temporarily.”

The memory that had always been so dear to Craig somehow crystalizes into something even better.

~

Over the next few months, Cort takes over Craig’s tiny apartment. It doesn’t matter to Cort that the view of the water is pathetic from there. Craig and Eddie move into an apartment above Craig’s office. The building is a weird reimagined warehouse in Venice Beach, and it’s wildly reminiscent of the modern art loft that Craig had brought Eddie into a decade earlier. It’s close enough to Craig’s former apartment that they can keep an eye on Cort.

Craig goes swimming every day. Occasionally Eddie tags along, when he’s not working too much and has energy to spare. And every single day, a fresh start. A little progress, a little stronger the connection. Eddie remains eerily unaged, and that makes it weird for Craig. He wonders what people think when they see them together. But in another more significant way, he doesn’t give a single solitary fuck.

Every time they get out for a swim together, he thinks of the very first time they swam together, and the entirety of the intervening decade. All the fluky happenstances of life are one thing. All the people in their circle who had to be exactly a certain way is another.

Gina, who fell in love with Eddie first. Who loved him so easily at the very sight of him, that it had caused Craig to take a second look. Gina, who had held Craig close when he needed to be held close and forced him to go when it was time to let go.

Mitch, who still falls head-over-heels in love with every single woman he ever meets. Who can see through Craig like he’s made of glass. Mitch, who reassures Craig over and over that he’s alive, that he still has a lot of life left to live.

Shauni, with her great big open heart. Eddie is plainly, deeply proud of her for the woman she’s become. Craig is grateful to her for the man she allowed Eddie to become.

Cort, who never has and never will let Eddie down, despite his unconventional ideas about the kinds of activities that good friends should get into together.

And to Craig’s eternal dismay, a few years down the road it winds up being Cort who closes the circle for the boys at the beach. In a way, everything falls into place, every single element, because of _A Cort Thing TM_. Craig does the math:

_Eddie remains worshipfully devoted to Cort and his incessant troublemaking. The two of them manage to drum up a frankly disturbing amount of business for Eddie’s live-in lawyer boyfriend. In turn, Craig passes along piles of investigation work to his best friend, Mitch, and Garner. And in becoming a fulltime private investigator, Mitch has left behind his job at Baywatch. Which has allowed Eddie to rise up the ranks without putting his mentor into the unemployment line. Thus, Eddie is a fixture on the beach, which is where Cort tends to stage his shenanigans…_

A perfect circle. Another cycle that continues endlessly. All those years where Cort would crash into the beach and blow things up literally and figuratively, and now his settling in has been the final element for symbiosis. The wave is a repeating pattern of eternal crests and troughs. It carries Craig out to sea sometimes, but he has a pretty good bunch of lifeguards watching his back.

 


End file.
